Category: New

Facing facts for Ford’s fortunes.

by Peter Lowry

So, you think Ontario premier Doug Ford is riding the white charger towards a 2022 election victory? You are probably deluding your self. Much can happen in the next two years. And there is more than enough of the old-Ford poking through the current veneer to convince us that he has hardly traded in his crude, rude and bombastic approach to politics. What Ford has shown too many times is his impatience for political realities.

What he has yet to realize is that if you want to drain the swamp at Queen’s Park, you had better have planned ahead for questions, such as, ‘Where are the alligators going to live?’.

But pre-planning is not Ford’s forte. He is, at best, an uneducated, seat-of-the-pants salesman. When it is your father’s business, you can sometimes get away with bluff and bluster. And his late brother left him with a limited understanding of politics. His first 18 months at Queen’s Park were not so easy.

Ford was rescued by a pandemic. He started out bluffing it, and then looked around and realized that everyone else was just as confused, and as scared as he was. He also saw that the smart politicians were listening to the medical experts and following their instructions. He could do that. With some rough spots and a bit of bluster now and then, he got with the program.

Unlike prime minister Trudeau who does a single at the Rideau Cottage cuckoo clock, Ford uses political and civil service back-up for his briefings. Sometimes, it is worth it to watch health minister Christine Elliott’s limited range of expressions as Ford does his spiel

Ford must have liked it when he started getting kudos on how good a job he is doing. That could go to his head.

And he looked silly as he vacillated on the question of people going to their cottages. The economy of the lake country of Ontario depends on that traffic north that marks holiday times.

In politics, it is win some, lose some. It is still a long way to the next election in Ontario.

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

The Great Canadian Gun Con.

by Peter Lowry

Watching that one-time cop, now Canada’s public safety minister, Bill Blair, blather on about guns is annoying. The liberal plan to do something about the proliferation of guns in our society is nothing more than a con job. When you are grandfathering the guns that are already out there, you are hardly banning them.

Canadians have been asking for a total ban on weapons other than those designed and registered for law enforcement, skeet and target shooting or licensed hunting. There is absolutely no need for collectors to have operable weapons. And collections need to be certified as inoperable by qualified arms experts.

What also worries me is the suggestion that Canada’s aboriginals should be collectively exempt from the ban. That would be a license to stock guns of all types along with the cigarettes so freely sold to anybody on first nation’s properties. I live 30-minutes down the highway from the Mnjikaning First Nation Indian Reserve No. 32 on Lake Couchiching, whose property includes Rama Casino.

At a rough guess, if the cigarette sellers on that reserve were selling only to residents of the reserve, every man, woman and child on that reserve must be smoking about 12 packages of cigarettes every day. Canada has more than a few unprotected borders.

What does not seem to be widely understood about firearms in Canada is that modern assault weapons, capable of continuous fire, are already banned. These are the weapons that can fire hundreds of rounds in a minute. Those weapons have never been approved for sale or possession in Canada.

But what city police really want to be rid of are hand guns. Nobody hunts game with a Glock. These sneak over the border from the U.S. and also go astray from legal (and illegal) collections. They are then passed around by kid gangs for serious mayhem. These untrained shooters are such bad shots that they often kill the wrong person—according to some victims’ families.

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

And the show goes on.

by Peter Lowry

Just when you have lost all interest in America’s president Trump, he finds something more ugly, more tawdry with which to entertain you. There seem to be none of the deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger or sloth that do not entice and enthrall him.

Is this man’s pride so great that he can abuse the memory of Abraham Lincoln? How dare he use the Lincoln Memorial as a set for his virtual rally? In the time of the novel coronavirus, he invited the disgusting Fox News organization into the place wherein sits the figure of a great man—a man who has inspired generations of Americans.

Not that Fox News and Donald trump are not of the same ilk. Fox News glorifies Trump. Trump is Fox News—bad news. They hit bottom together as sleaze interviews sleaze. Even the magnificence of the setting could not help.

It was an open invitation for Trump to brag. He wants to tell his followers of his triumphs, his triumphs over imaginary foes—in the Congress and the news media. He wants to spread his paranoia and his braggadocio and his lies.

It was not so many years ago that the wife and I drove to Washington in late May to enjoy the city as though we were tourists. I remember getting off the tour bus to stand at the bottom of the steps up to the Lincoln Memorial. It was a quiet moment to honour Lincoln.

In all the times I had been in the District of Columbia on business or a speaking engagement, I had never seen any of its monuments close up. Washington is a city of monuments to the great and not so great of American politics. Yet, whether major or minor players on the political scene, each, in their way, leaves their legacy. I seriously wonder how future historians will explain Donald Trump.

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Who Knew?

by Peter Lowry

Politics can be full of strange happenings. Canada had an election seven months ago. The guy who was prime minister is still prime minister and doing very well, thank you. He lost 20 members of his party caucus and his party came second in popular vote. You would think he would have something about which he might be embarrassed.

But no. It was the poor schmuck whose party won the popular vote and who led an additional 26 members of his party to Ottawa, who saw the handwriting on the wall. Party leader Andrew Scheer resigned before the party took a vote to tell him to get lost. Scheer resigned as conservative party leader and, it turns out, few want the job.

And yet there were other strange things that happened last October. The guy who more than doubled his number of MPs in the house of commons was the leader of the Bloc Québécois. The Bloc vote alone, handled carefully, could keep the liberals in power for the full four years of this parliament.

The guy who lost the most in the election was the leader of the new democratic party. Jagmeet Singh dropped 15 members of his caucus and did not seem to even consider it a bad-hair day. What? Him resign? I guess nobody in his party thought of it.

The person who really won big was green party leader, Elizabeth May. She not only won her own seat but she doubled the size of her caucus. She went from one MP to two. With this accomplishment under her belt, May promptly resigned as leader. She had had enough. She might have been the only smart party leader left.

I would dearly love to report that peace, order and good government prevailed after the election. And then along came a novel coronavirus pandemic and everything went to Hell. I am sitting here in my den, drinking my morning coffee, doing nothing, looking out at the world and wondering what I will feel like writing about tomorrow?

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Same-old, same-old Tory party.

by Peter Lowry

This conservative leadership contest is a disaster. What started out to be dull and boring has been made doubly dull and boring. We are now advised that we will know who has won the conservative party leadership on August 27. Surprise, surprise, Peter MacKay will likely be crowned. Boring wins again!

This commentary could probably end with that one paragraph. That is all it is worth.

But it seems that likely loser, Erin O’Toole, has a strategy. He is supposing that, for some reason, a slim majority of party voters decide that Peter Mackay is the most boring of all candidates. There are four candidates and O’Toole’s strategy is to try to be every conservative voter’s second choice. That way, in a tighter race, he could win on the second or third count. That is the beauty of the conservative ranked-choice balloting: It elects the most acceptable, not the most preferred.

What it means is that O’Toole needs to run a campaign savaging Peter MacKay and building up the confidence of the two other also-rans. He has to keep those other two in the running.

Mind you, it might be tough to keep social-conservative Derek Sloan in the race. When the MP made the gaffe of attacking Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief medical office of health, last week, many of his fellow conservative caucus members were calling for his head.

There might be other reasons to keep Leslyn Lewis in the race. It seems that $200,000 is a lot to spend on proving that the conservative party is not the white-bread party of old. When you listen to her social-conservative views, it is hard to think of her as a popular member of Toronto’s black community.

But even if Peter MacKay’s campaign never does shake its doldrums, O’Toole is almost as boring. He reminds us of the Porky Pig character that used to break through the drum at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons, saying, “Th-Th-That’s all folks.”

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

And children should lead them.

by Peter Lowry

The educators in Quebec might be smarter than we thought. Sending the children back to school is not as foolhardy as you might think. It will do much for the sanity of parents. It is even more beneficial for the children. These are immature minds that need to learn. They need the interaction with their peers. They need the structure of the classroom.

And there is also risk. We have been told that children are less likely to be carriers or to become sick with covid-19. The major concern is for them to take the virus home with them or pass it to their teachers.

If I were a Quebec parent sending children off to school, I would want decontamination materials ready at the door when they got home. I would decontaminate them first and then hug them.

But it would be unlikely to take long to see if the opening is premature or not. There needs to be some constant testing. No society can afford to make teaching any riskier, than it is already. Nor do we take unnecessary risks with our children.

It appears that Quebec and Denmark will be the pioneering jurisdictions that will either prove or disprove the case. Denmark is doing a gradual opening, starting with younger children this month. Quebec is opening its schools after the May 24 weekend.

A key to the Quebec program will be that the parents are not required to send their children to school so soon. It is optional. This is likely to reduce class sizes which will make it easier for teachers to maintain some separation and to speed up the learning process. The students have already missed too many weeks of school.

It also needs to be noted that Quebec is still suffering the ravages of the virus. The worst of it is in long-term care facilities and seniors’ residences. The logic for Quebec’s Legault government is that if the schools can become functional so can day-care facilities and that means, employees can be heading back to work. And the sooner that happens, the sooner we can start work on an economic recovery.

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Glen’s coat of many colors turns Green.

by Peter Lowry

Former mayor of Winnipeg, former member of the Ontario legislature, former Ontario cabinet minister and former executive director of the Calgary-based Pembina Institute, Glen Murray, has a new quest. He wants to replace Elizabeth May as head of the Green Party of Canada. It might not be one of his best ideas.

What best illustrates the problem with Murray is when you google his name and the Pembina Institute. What you get is two announcements. One is his appointment as executive director of the institute and then, a year later, is his resignation. It makes you wonder what happened in between?

The only statement of interest about the resignation was made to a reporter at the time. It was the information that he was returning to Winnipeg, and ‘No, he was no longer interested in politics.’

Murray was the first openly gay mayor of a large Canadian city. When he came to Toronto, he quickly became part of Toronto’s large gay community and when the local MPP stepped down, Murray was acclaimed to run for the liberals. He won in 2009 and served in the liberal cabinet over the next eight years in the portfolios of innovation and research, transportation, and environment and climate change.

Murray even ran for the leadership of the liberal party. He gave this up to make a deal with Kathleen Wynne two weeks before the convention. He virtually gave her the role of premier of Canada’s largest province. And served in her cabinet until his resignation in 2017. It was the next year that the party was decimated in the general election and conservative Doug Ford became premier.

The only accomplishment that Murray took the credit for in the liberal cabinet was the implementation of cap-and-trade to lower carbon emissions. If this is what he has to offer Canada’s green party, they need to understand that cap-and-trade is something that is very hard to explain to the general public. It is carried on out of public view and requires lots of explanation to the voters.

Doug Ford killed cap-and-trade in Ontario as soon as he took over as premier. The voters will probably never know how much it cost them.

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Trudeau’s triumph.

by Peter Lowry

Fess up, guys, prime minister Justin Trudeau has won. The wonder kid has changed his spots and been exactly what Canadians have needed. Santa Claus came early this year. Even Bob Hepburn of the Toronto Star says that the Trudeau haters have been proved wrong.

While I pointed out a while ago that Trudeau lucked into his ideal positioning, I have had to admit that he has handled it well. He might still be an elitist but even an elitist can accept his good luck.

But I must admit that his appearances out of the cuckoo clock at Rideau Cottage have worn thin. There is no need for him to continue in his singles showcase and he can join with the hoi polloi from the cabinet and senior civil servants for briefings. Almost daily briefings make sense as long as the covid-19 scene keeps fulminating.

What Bob Hepburn is ignoring is that those Trudeau haters who blame Justin for everything, including the flooding in Fort McMurray, Alberta, will still hate him after the battle against covid-19 is over.

What I am hoping is what he has learned throughout this experience sticks with him. What has annoyed me about Justin in the past has been his unabashed elitism. You cannot remain elitist though when you are forced to understand the serious neglect our society has shown for those less fortunate. What he has seen so many times now that programs designed in Ottawa to reach these people are very hard to create and very difficult to manage.

What he has to understand is that the one-per cent with whom he has hobnobbed all his life are the ones who are out-of-step with being Canadian. I always got the feeling that the middle class to which he was always referring when campaigning existed only in his own mind.

I keep getting the feeling that this country is going to be very different after we shut the door on covid-19. I think we have learned too much about our short-comings through this first half of 2020, to ever want to be the same country again.

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

On this day in May.

by Peter Lowry

Before we send out more distress signals, we need to take stock of our situation. We have been hiding in our homes for less than two months while essential workers carry on the battle of the pandemic. The coming battles will be to restore a battered and in-debt economy. And what, if anything, will be the same?

Anything close to ‘normal’ is months away from now. We still have to beat covid-19. We are not there yet. And how can we complain if this self-isolation is saving lives?

But what worries us is how we are penning up our most vulnerable in long-term care facilities, seniors’ residences and assisted living. It reminds me of the pens at the stockyards.

I have an older brother living in a classy residence in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. He is a virtual prisoner in his apartment, while very caring building managers keep him well fed and informed. My brother tells us that he wants for nothing but the one thing the managers cannot hide is their fear of this disease.

He was one of the brothers who joined a dozen family members yesterday in a meeting on the Internet program Zoom. It was noisy, disjointed and confusing, as is any meeting of members of my family. It was fun.

But it showed me that it is absolutely amazing that they could make a similar meeting for about 300 members of our Canadian parliament work—after a fashion. As I think I said the other day: they might learn how to do it if they had more professional help and would listen to those experts. To get it right, will probably take them until the next scheduled federal election in three years—or the end of the coronavirus pandemic, whichever comes first.

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]

Some people never learn.

by Peter Lowry

Writing about the ministry of education in Ontario yesterday reminded me of the time in the early 1980s when I complained, loudly, that Dr. Bette Stephenson, then minister of education, was out of her depth talking about computers. Nobody would have noticed if I had not said it on the CBC evening news. As a frequent spokesperson for the Canadian computer industry, I should not have said her announcement of the Icon class-room computer was ridiculous. It was almost ten years before the ministry of education would agree with me.

The point I was trying to make at the time was that computers keep evolving, software is changing for the better (maybe) and different types of platforms are being introduced. It is not just Mac and Windows anymore.

I thought an amusing article in the Toronto Star by a harassed mother of three youngsters said it all yesterday when she found that three children in different grades need three different computers. The headline noted that she may chuck the Chromebook out the window. She found out what I was trying to tell the late Bette Stephenson, 40 years ago, the hard way.

It was why I laughed at the current minister when he first talked about computer-assisted education for Ontario students. I had a computer terminal in our kids’ playroom for a couple years around 1979-80 and I showed them how to access the General Education Development (GED) programs on it. I wanted to see how they reacted to the learning programs. They had little interest in the learning but quickly found the games. By the time he was 12, my son was already a backgammon wiz.

Developing computer-assisted learning is a very complicated marriage of computer expertise and teaching skills. It has to capture the interest of the student. It requires extensive testing and it has to be kept up to date. If you think it will save the ministry money, you have more to learn than the students.

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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to  [email protected]