New – Page 138 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Mad Dogs, Englishmen and Candidates.

July 22, 2019 by Peter Lowry

That knock on your door on this hot July day is more likely to be a candidate for the coming election. This time is gold for candidates, they can pick and choose strategic areas of the riding, they can test various approaches for the campaign to come and, most important, they have time to listen to voters.

As a campaign manager, I would often go with the candidate to watch how he or she handled questions, drew out the voter and watch the voter’s reaction to the candidate. It is also important to know when to shut down the conversation with the voter when it had gone far enough. People who want to trap the candidate too long in conversation are often not on your side.

The last time I spent a summer working with a candidate was in a municipal campaign and that summer was as hot as this one. Rather than risk our candidate to heat stroke on the hottest days, I would choose condominiums for him to canvas on the days were the temperature was over 30°C. Condominiums most frequently air condition the halls and a 15-storey building offers a comfortable afternoon of listening to voters.

One of the reasons that the campaign chair asked me to handle the ground game in that campaign was because he knew of my experience over the years in training canvassers. I always enjoyed that part of the job and I knew that getting good canvassers in this town was a tough job. I found I was training a few liberals but my best students were not liberals. In the subsequent federal election, I had the disquieting experience of conservative campaign people calling me to thank me for training them.

One of my satisfactions from that campaign was collecting a bet from the campaign manager. I collected it very publicly in front of the entire campaign team at the victory dinner. That ten bucks showed that the guy on the ground knows far more about a campaign than pollsters.

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Paint yourself Green.

July 21, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Green party leader Elizabeth May looks tired. The 65-year old is no stranger to politics or environmentalism. She has been touring in and around Barrie on some of the hottest days of the summer and she is showing the strain.

The wife and I would have loved to invite her up to our place for a tall cooling libation but the local liberals would never have understood. We could also have an interesting conversation about the coming election but that would only be if our guest wished.

And the lady is already having enough trouble with her party’s candidates. I know the local greens and neither could get my vote. The problem is that Ms. May is very liberal and knowledgeable in non-environmental subjects, her local candidates have no other talking points than environmental issues. They are one-trick ponies.

Ms. May’s biggest problem in this election is that her stance on the Trans Mountain pipeline is very close to that of Justin Trudeau. She wants to find a way to alleviate the economic impact of the pipeline’s cancellation. Unlike myself, she does not like to write-off the $4.5 billion Trudeau has already wasted on buying the pipeline.

We do have to face the fact that we will be reliant on refined oil products for quite a few years. The single-pipe, old pipeline can still make money and safely send Alberta’s refined products to the coast for the next dozen or so years. It is tripling the capacity over twin, heated pipes and using high pressure to send diluted bitumen to Burrard Inlet that worries most people. This use of the pipeline is dangerous for the land it is crossing through, the Rockies, the rivers and fish spawning it endangers and the endangerment of the Orca habitat. Just one serious spill of diluted bitumen would be there to haunt us for many, many years.

I expect the greens will have a few more seats in parliament after October 21. We will hope that they are helpful members of the party and not the myopic troublemakers who will make caucus discipline difficult for Elizabeth May.

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When you are ready, Justin Trudeau.

July 20, 2019 by Peter Lowry

Facing facts is not a favourite pastime for our prime minister. No doubt there were many old-time liberals who have told him he is heading for trouble. He has made a mess of a one-time strong party.

He said you did not have to pay a membership to be a liberal. You just had to be part of the list. Party members thought it was great to have more worker bees. The more the better.

But then our leader told us we were no longer members of the party we had supported in good times and bad. We were contributing what we could on a monthly basis to the party and yet the party cancelled our memberships. What kind of treatment is that?

Our electoral district associations, where we did not have a sitting MP after 2015, fell into disrepair. Party meetings at the local level were rare and poorly attended. Everyone forgot what it was like to have a quorum at executive meetings. Local party debts were not getting paid. Nobody was shoring us up in these ridings. We became orphans. Nobody cared about us.

All we were to the liberal party hierarchy was a long list to e-mail—as often as three times a day—for money. All their creative energy went to the task of creating new ways every day to say ‘Send Money.’

But what Justin forgot was that, along with the Canadian population, we liberals were aging. Try putting up with all those damn pleas for money when you are a senior on a fixed income? Justin was so busy rebuilding the middle class that he forgot all about the seniors and their daily battle with inflation. Our neoliberal finance minister, Bill Morneau, already has his retirement fund. Maybe he thinks we can inherit our own.

Justin, we gave you the right to lead this liberal party and you get a mixed report card on your effort to date. We had no right to expect perfection and we certainly did not get it.

But we do have the right to ask that you do not repeat your mistakes. Nor do you need to apologize. This job of prime minister is a wonderful opportunity to advance the human experience. You cannot fix the past. You can only fix the future.

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Political polls and other summer games.

July 19, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It is like playing Snakes and Ladders without the dice. It is phoning people at random and hoping they might tell you the truth. It is annoying people with recorded telephone calls and thinking they might be civil in return. It all adds up to bad guesses in a mug’s game.

But what else has the media to report? In the dog days of summer, they are just playing with numbers. The parties have the campaign buses ready for the shakedown cruises. They are testing slogans and trying to paper over the warts on their campaigns.

Mind you, it is safe to report that the conservatives and liberals are in the lead. Nobody will argue that at this stage. No serious gaffs have been noted. The NDP and greens are covering the middle ground. All it means, so far, is that a lot of people, sincere about the environment, will be disappointed. The Bloc and Bernier’s people party are fighting over the dregs of votes in Quebec. All in all, ho-hum and boring.

Come back during the first week in October and there will be some movement to report. Nobody can tell you what that movement will be. It might not even be statistically viable. The only polls you can really trust are the exit polls on election day.

But the game continues. Everyone wants to play at it. And I love the way some people are hedging their bets. It is so bad that the CBC is hiring right-wing writers from Post Media to assure the world of their neutrality. People wonder why Nanos and Mainstreet always show the liberals contending. Do they favour the libs?

Following the pollsters is like playing poker in a rigged game. It hardly pays. Yet, if it is the only game in town, you want to be where the action is.

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‘Yesteryear Politicos’ and ‘Tired Advice.’

July 18, 2019 by Peter Lowry

(This posting has been modified to include some corrections. I apologize for the earlier errors.)

Most people are probably unaware that they can get a good laugh about Canadian politics from the Ottawa digital newsletters, Hill Times or iPolitics, almost every day.

Back when you could get complete samples of the newsletters, I determined that the average ages of their opinion writers might be about those of my grandsons. While I am very proud of them (my grandsons), they do not have the experience needed to contribute much in the way of opinions on Canadian politics. Nor do I find the opinions I have read from both publications show much experience.

Since iPolitics is owned by the Toronto Star, you would think that Susan Delacourt or some of the Star’s old timers would pitch in occasionally to give the kids a hand.

What prompted this comment was the hilarious plaint from Hill Times writers yesterday that the green party had reached into the past. They were engaging “in politics of (a) bygone era” and had hired “a politico from yesteryear” to be in their “war room.”

I can remember in the early 2000s when liberals asked me who was this upstart Kinsella running some ‘war room’ for the liberals? It makes sense to me that green leader Elizabeth May needs even more help to keep her green troops in line.

Before I knew that the Toronto Star had bought iPolitics, I had even offered the newsletter some of my expertise. They did not seem interested and that is their loss.

In any event, the better story than the green party’s desperation is the war room being created out in Calgary. This is Alberta premier Jason Kenney’s answer to people who do not agree with him. That should be a very busy war room.

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A house divided or a leaderless nation?

July 17, 2019 by Peter Lowry

There was an excellent discussion in Progressive Bloggers the other day by the gentleman who writes under the nom de plume of The Mound of Sound. A very small quibble you might have with the article was there were a couple times that you might be confused as to whether he was writing about the United States or Canada? I would argue with The Mound that the current tensions in Canada might be more serious than America being a world-wide laughingstock.

To put it to rest, I think the Americans have been living with their corrupt political system for too long not to see their road to redemption. We can have high hopes for people such as those four young House of Representatives members that Trump brought to prominence in his usual boorish way. Those, and others who share their drive and ambition, are the ones who can help lead the fight to unseat emperor Trump next year. Without them, there would be no hope for America.

I feel much more concern for the imbroglio Canadians are heading towards in just three months. This election is becoming unwinnable for any party. It is based on regional greed, regional barriers, angry aboriginals, mistreated veterans, open bribery, serious environmental concerns and a lot of lies and a large helping of stupidity (and don’t ask me which party has the largest share of that).

It is very hard to believe that I live in a riding open to a win by the liberals and the incompetents running the liberal party have no candidate here, with an election in less than 100 days. I have no idea why these people cannot learn anything. These idiots have known about this coming election for four years yet they have allowed the riding to lose more than two-thirds of the party membership it had four years ago. Explain the genius behind that and you get a gold star.

That hardly could explain why conservative leader ‘Chuckles’ Scheer needs to find a way to silence Jason Kenney in Alberta and send him and Doug Ford to Antarctica to check out global warming for the next three months. Justin Trudeau is going to walk up one side of Chuckles and down the other in this election and it will hardly make any difference in the final result.

All I know is that, whatever happens, Justin will not like it.

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When voters can care less.

July 16, 2019 by Peter Lowry

When we talk about the Ontario voters who now regret their urge to vote for the Ford conservatives last year, we are hardly talking about all. Many of these same people are proud to tell you that they will vote for Andrew ‘Chuckles’ Scheer’s conservatives this fall. The entire conservative election strategy can be summed up as: identify the knuckle-draggers; make sure they vote.

And you know you cannot win any argument over it. They know that Chuckles is a wus. He is their wus. They hate Justin Trudeau. They see him as the arch enemy. They refer to him with homophobic slurs. They never see him as doing anybody any good. They blame him for all of our national debt. They have very convenient memories of Stephen Harper’s reign.

It makes me want to take back every nasty word I have ever said about Justin. He might not be much of an environmentalist but he might be the best we will get for a while. If he had asked me about voting reform, he could have saved a mess of embarrassment promising that it was the last time we would use first-past-the-post. Mind you, the fact we still have first-past-the-post could save his job for him in October.

And how can a guy who needs to be able to count on women to tip the scales for him in October, make such an ass of himself with Jody Wilson-Raybould? Here he is mistreating women when he has no idea of how to handle that idiot Trump in the White House. Was he too busy getting selfies with all those world leaders he met, not to bother making nice with the president of China?

No, our prime minister is not perfect. He should get the praise he deserves and the smack downs for when he screws up.

But the very thought of Chuckles in the prime minister’s office is enough to make me upchuck. The conservatives picked him out of a field of 13 candidates to sit in opposition until they could choose a more popular and dynamic leader sometime in 2021. They never thought Chuckles would even be a contender this year.

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Trudeau should listen to McCallum.

July 15, 2019 by Peter Lowry

John McCallum was building a very solid career as a professor and as an economist when he took a misstep into politics in 2000. While it took him a while to learn the ropes, his greatest political success was in Justin Trudeau’s government as immigration, refugees and citizenship minister. He brought in large numbers of Syrian refugees with help from Canadians from coast to coast. He made his mark.

But what amount of ego encouraged him to take the post of ambassador to China, we might never understand? He could hardly be so foolish as to think his ethnic Chinese wife gave him a leg up. This man, who throughout his career had been paid for his opinions, was now supposed to be a noviciate to Chrystia Freeland in Canada’s foreign affairs. That was a bad position for a free thinker.

John McCallum would have been introduced in Beijing as ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary (meaning he had the right to speak for the Queen in the right of Canada). He barely opened his mouth for the next two years but that was learning the job time. When he did speak his mind, he was fired.

And that firing did no good for John McCallum and it did no good for Justin Trudeau. What John said was his opinion that Canada would be better off to release Huawei executive Meng Wanzhuo. Donald Trump had indicated that the request for extradition was political. Canada has an obligation to comply with legal requests for extradition to the U.S. for legal reasons but not for political.

The prime minister ignored the door that the American president had opened. What it said to the Chinese was that Trudeau was so firm in his desire to support the Trump position that he would fire a man who told the truth.

To make matters worse, John McCallum was fired at the end of January and no replacement has been announced six months later. That is an insult to the Chinese. They have recalled the Chinese ambassador in retaliation.

And just to rub salt, the conservatives are now complaining about some recent McCallum remarks. He told the Chinese that further retaliation would just help the conservatives in the coming election in Canada. The conservatives told the Canadian Security Intelligence Service about it. What exactly CSIS can do about a private citizen expressing an opinion, we are not sure.

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When Premiers come out to play.

July 14, 2019 by Peter Lowry

It was an interesting pack of premiers around the conference table at this year’s Canadian premiers’ meeting. They hardly had Justin Trudeau under their thumb. And they hardly bothered to try.

This was a meeting to plan for October’s federal election. The odd men out were the bookends—John Horgan of British Columbia, NDP, and Dwight Ball of Newfoundland and Labrador, liberal. It was hardly a surprise for the premiers to recognize François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) as an honorary conservative regime.

The conservative cohort were all invited to a preplanning meeting and a flapjack flipping event at the Calgary Stampede the week before. At that meeting, the real chair of the premiers, Jason Kenney held sway. The only notable aspect of that event was when they found out that Doug Ford could not flip a flapjack without burning it.

But then Ford was out of his element at both meetings. The other premiers found him boring, competitive, wrong and rude. He made the opening gaff of the conference in Saskatoon by not attending the opening meeting with some of Canada’s aboriginal leaders on a reserve just outside of town. (God forbid that he ever learn anything or to even respect others.)

What was different at the actual conference was the unanimity of the premiers demanding that more be done to combat Buy America policies in the U.S. that run counter to the new North American trade agreement, that might or might not be approved by Congress in the next year.

There were also the usual promises to do something about trade barriers between provinces that business people have been struggling with for many years. It was just another chance for Ford to do some sloganeering about Ontario being open for business. They knew that.

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Be kind to your local NDP.

July 13, 2019 by Peter Lowry

No doubt we all know a few new democratic party stalwarts. They are neither as numerous nor as annoying as they once were but they all need a hug these days. They are angry, bewildered, concerned, depressed, you name it. They are not their formerly misguided but cheerful selves. They have fallen on hard times.

One of my frequent flyers (readers), an Ontario NDP, through and through, recently sent me a rather pointed comment on one of my postings. He headlined his e-mail: “You Fucking Idiot.”

He obviously felt strongly on the subject.

What the Dipper was complaining about was my calling the agreement between unpaid consultant Ed Clark and Brewers’ Warehousing a specious matter. “Specious” in this instance was used to indicate the document was plausible but would be a useless piece of paper if signed just by Mr. Clark. It is like a ‘ghost’ document. “Ghost” in this context being something people talk about but nobody has ever seen.

The problem I have with this supposed agreement is that it also committed Brewers’ Warehousing to a budget of $100 million per year to expand, improve and maintain their sales premises. Looking at the Beer Store’s latest audited statement (2014), you are a bit confused about their saying they kept their end of the deal.

The first problem is that in an industry that grosses about $4 billion per year in Ontario, the Beer Store only shows us cost recovery. With 450 stores in Ontario, you would expect the beer retailer to be adding new stores and shipping locations and maintaining the older locations. It is hard to believe that the Beer Store could do that for less than $100 million per year.

Our friendly NDPer is giving us the union B.S. that by weakening the Beer Stores’ monopoly further, we would be jeopardizing 7000 well paying jobs. It would make sense to pull all the part-time jobs from that figure before saying they are well paid.

But if the Beer Store does the distribution to the convenience stores, they could create even more jobs. Who is lying to whom here?

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