Category: New

Ford’s Fall Guy.

by Peter Lowry

In the time-honoured tradition of sleazy politics, Ryan Amato, who, until the turfing, was chief of staff to the Ontario housing minister, got turfed out the back door at Queen’s Park the other day. I would suggest though, you save your tears for his supposed disgrace. He obviously got the golden handshake. He might also have got some hush money. Ryan Amato might have a book he could write or some more interesting interviews. Yet he has proved to be a stand-up guy. He can also take his time in picking just the right job in Ontario’s home building industry.

Which one of the companies, who want to build homes in the Greenbelt, will make Amato the best offer? Don’t forget folks, this guy knows the premier and the minister of housing’s phone numbers. Amato will have two years to ingratiate himself to his new masters. Even when Ford is no longer in Queen’s Park, Amato has the key to behind the scenes in the ministry of housing. The pay off at Queen’s Park might be healthy but the payoff over the next two years will set the boy up for a life of luxury.

It was Bonnie Lysyk’s report on the $8.28 billion deal for Greenbelt land that led to Amato’s resignation. And unless Doug Ford feels some easing in the complaints, his municipal affairs and housing minister Steve Clark will be the next head on the chopping block.

The only problem is that Clark is a member of the legislature and would be expected to sit with the other outcasts in the corner of the legislature. He would, of course be expected to return to the cabinet when the dust of the Greenbelt fiasco settles.

What you cannot expect is for Ford to resign. He insists that the buck stops at his desk but like any school-yard bully, he only talks the talk. He doesn’t walk the walk. Ford will be there for the 2026 provincial election. The Greenbelt will still be the main topic despite all attempts by Ford to change the dialogue. Some things, politicians cannot survive.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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It Isn’t Intelligent.

by Peter Lowry

It was confusing the other day when the Toronto Star ran an opinion piece about artificial intelligence being discriminatory for black people. It was not until you read some of the story that it was clear that the article was about computer programs for facial recognition. This is not as much about artificial intelligence as it is about the world’s peoples, their languages and their facial characteristics.

Back in the 1970s there were many serious programs going on at universities aided by computer companies to facilitate language translation. The computer company I worked for in Mississauga at the time, became something of a clearing house for exchanging thoughts and solutions on many of these problems. In many ways the work played into your sense of humour. To make a correct translation required that you not only programmed in the meanings of words but how they were expressed in the other language’s cultural and logical thought process.

This thinking came in handy when two of my brothers and I started up a company to combine our computer-related experience. As I was the least technical of the brothers, I got the job of running the company.

One of our first projects was to work with the Metropolitan Toronto Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to find a way to computerize the millions of photographs of people who had been photographed by one of our police forces. We quickly found that developing the programs necessary would require millions of dollars. Not having that kind of funding, we moved on to other projects.

One of the realities of facial recognition is the same as in language translation. Different racial characteristics are more complicated than the world’s languages. And people of mixed racial background are sometimes in a class by themselves. You actually need to determine the predominant racial characteristics before allocating the individual to a particular database.

I can well appreciate the problems with the black racial characteristics but the range of characteristics is as broad for the Asiatic.

The only places I know that are trying to upgrade their facial recognition are Ontario’s casinos. Back during the pandemic when the casinos were still open, you were smart to wear a mask. They asked you to stop on the way in and lower your mask so they could get a clear picture. They have some shots of me with my bare face and a middle finger raised. Who do they think they are kidding?

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Danielle Smith Selects.

by Peter Lowry

If you were wondering who else might support the Ottawa cowboy, Pierre Poilievre, as leader of the federal conservatives, you can certainly add the Wicked Witch of the West, Alberta premier Danielle Smith, to your list.  She is no Doug Ford. The Ontario premier seems a little lukewarm on the Ottawa cowboy and he is definitely on Team Trudeau when it comes to the new energy plan for electrical systems across Canada. 

The Ontario conservative solution to energy for the future is nuclear. There was a short term there when the Ontario conservatives were headed for increased use of natural gas. After the outcry to the natural gas solution, they found that the nuclear option was the best long-term and economic answer. And it was not causing mother nature to fight back. It is an answer that nobody really likes but it works.

While the Ottawa cowboy scoffs at anything proposed by the Trudeau government, he has no solutions either. It seems a bit tragic that Poilievre’s party can raise more funds than the liberals when the conservatives have no solutions to climate change, housing or inflation. It is as though the dumbest among us, don’t know what else to do with their money.

The wicked witch and her friends should listen to themselves sometime. Instead of cutting back on the emissions of greenhouse gas, their solution is to promise improved carbon capture. The one problem with carbon capture is that it can never reach 100 per cent, it becomes much more expensive when the carbon has to be trucked or transmitted by pipeline to a storage site. And carbon capture does not apply when the final oil product is used. That is when the most greenhouse gasses are emitted.

Where Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre fail Canadians and particularly Albertans, is they have no direction beyond non-renewable resources. They want to continue to rape our environment. Smith recently put a moratorium on wind and sunlight electrical generation in Alberta, out of pique or anger at Ottawa setting those environmental goals on electrical generation. Luckily, provinces such as Ontario and Quebec can meet those targets and are well ahead of the challenge.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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A Tip Too Far.

by Peter Lowry

The growing arguments about the practice of tipping for service deserve some decent airing. Having experienced the attitude towards tipping in Japan, I admit that I would be happy to see it banned in North America. It is demeaning to the people receiving the gratuity as it is for the person paying for it.

I think most of us in Ontario are caught off guard enough when we forget the 13.5 per cent Harmonized Sales Tax that is being added to our bill. If you want us to add another 15 or 20 per cent to that, you are just being generous with our money. And the very idea of raising tipping to 30 per cent is ridiculous.

The practice of tipping for service was corrupted a long time ago by the practice of pooling them so not only the wait staff shared them but the cooks, maître d’, busboys and dishwashers all came into a portion. Casinos get into the action with the tip boxes at table games that are shared with all casino staff. And why we tip people delivering food or anything else to our home is beyond me?

What this practice tells us is that these people are not paid adequately by their employers and we, the customer, are expected to supplement their income. Why? That seems like a precarious way for these people to live. And it gets them in trouble with the tax people when they skim off too much so as to not pay their full tax load.

What gets me annoyed with the practice is when a company adds a tip automatically. And when annoyed enough, I have been known to demand a company reverse that tip. A good example of this was the other day when the wife and I felt like some Swiss Chalet chicken for supper and we stopped on the way home to pick up dinner. As a hangover from Covid rules, they did not want you to wait inside for your order. They asked us to wait at one of their numbered signs outside. An employee brought us our order. It was when I looked at the detailed copy of the bill later, that I noticed we had been charged $4.49 for a tip for the employee who had brought out the food. That just annoyed me.  

Ontario would be very smart to phase out tipping whether the rest of the country did or not. It would be a novelty for North America and a shot in the arm for the province’s tourism, convention and hospitality industry.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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Blaming Voting Systems.

by Peter Lowry

One of Justin Trudeau’s promises in the 2015 federal election was that it would be the last time Canadians would use first-past-the-post voting. And you know how far he got with that idea. His first error was to give the challenge of change to a minister who seemed to have little understanding of how democracies work.

What should have been beneficial was the special committee of parliament that was created to study the subject. The committee hearings were streamed across the country for the edification of anyone interested. I might have been one of the few who watched, listened and felt I was gaining a better understanding of how Canadians approached the subject.

I have also had the advantage of visiting countries around the world with different voting, varied political structures and different results. You might have a good laugh at the city hall in Stockholm but the politics can be boring and slow on the uptake. Another riot in the Diet in Tokyo can be puzzling but the results aren’t too bad. I was impressed with the run-off for president in France. The French aren’t opposed to trying new approaches. Watching the Lords in London is just another exercise in watching paint dry. I always think of Washington D.C. as a city of monuments, many of them in the U.S. Senate.

But Canada is a special problem. I think of our system as a failure of British colonialism. The Brits bequeathed us with a copy of the British parliament but screwed us by giving too much power to our former colonies, in the form of provinces.

I was not as disappointed with some of the political science professors but it was not as encouraging to listen to their views as I hoped. When the committee seemed insistent in listening to so many of them, you would have thought the odd good idea might come along with some solutions. No such luck.

That was one of the few times when Canadians saw an impasse in a special committee. It was one of those times when, divided down party lines, the committee agreed to disagree. There was no acceptable solution.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]

Poilievre’s Passion.

by Peter Lowry

It is hard to believe that MP Pierre Poilievre has made it as far as he has. His summer travels seem to be a cross between Adolph Hitler’s rants in Bavarian beer halls and Donald Trump’s preaching to the ignorant in America. What we are hearing is lies, lies and more lies. I apologize for laughing when I first heard of Poilievre’s attack on the World Economic Forum (WEF). I could not imagine a less dangerous organization.

The WEF is an opportunity for the rich and famous of the world to get together and pontificate. It can be quite harmless. Demonizing the WEF makes no sense. If Mr. Poilievre needs some organization to demonize, he should look to the Fraser Institute. The Fraser Institute is the antithesis of the WEF. The WEF is looking for ideas. The Fraser Institute pays academics to write opinions that favour the politically right-wing tenets of the Fraser Institute.

 In demonizing the WEF, Poilievre is counting on his audience not to do their own research and find that WEF ideas are usually not that threatening. And he certainly is not interested in discussing it with a reporter who might have a university education. Mr. Poilievre finds it more rewarding to concentrate on building support among the foolish and the uneducated.

One of his more interesting scare tactics at the moment is that Justin Trudeau is planning a digital identification (ID) for all Canadians. I can hardly think of any reason to bother anyone with that idea when it has already been accomplished with your social insurance number.

Some academics consider this to just be a phase Poilievre is going through on his determined march on the prime minister’s office. They think he will pivot once in power. I would question that when you consider how much he is like the former American president Donald Trump. Mr. Trump never let truth stand in his way.

Neither would the truth stand in the way, once Poilievre was in power. If his lies and slurs get him that far, he would have little reason to stop. As Mr. Trump has shown, there is little concern for the fact that power corrupts. And he has also proved that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

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Our Daily Bread.

by Peter Lowry

Why do we have government? When did we start praying to the government to “Give us this day, our daily bread?” Is this a democratic government? It is not God, that is for sure. And yet, if it is a democratic government, should it not look for ways to ensure its people can be fed in this 21st century? Is it not the welfare of all its citizens that should concern our government?

Canadians have a convoluted system of government that is so wrong in this day. It has a federal government and provincial governments and they each can blame the other for their failures. The recent coronavirus killed more than 50,000 Canadians. It was remarkable how fast the federal government was able to obtain vaccines. It was remarkable how the provincial governments let their hospitals collapse under the weight of patients sick with the disease. Lock-downs meant different strategies in different provinces. And federal lock-downs conflicted.

Today we have run-away inflation and people are starting to grow hungry. Our grocery stores are more worried about shoplifting that can eat into their windfall capital gains. What do our governments do? They point the finger at each other.

And how is Canada going to house its burgeoning population. Our country needs more people and we cannot accommodate them. The federal government makes faint promises and provincial governments are exploiting the opportunities to their political benefit.

And what do we do about this? Those who think we can change our constitution have a fight on their hands. It is a carryover of our British-crafted colonialism. There are more ways to say ‘no’ than there are to say ‘yes.’ And you can align the ‘nos’ with the provinces. We will even have difficulty in dispensing with the monarchy—despite the majority of Canadians who don’t give a damn about them.

You can almost forget the possibilities to have a democratic constitution. The smaller the fiefdom, the harder they will fight to keep it.

I have always imagined a constitutional congress in Canada. Boy, that is a battle I would love to take part in!

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]

Modern Meetings.

by Peter Lowry

If there were a few things we learned during the coronavirus pandemic, one of them is how to have better computer to computer meetings. I’ve watched the progress in this field with great interest. We have come a long way since I was running national meetings with people connected to the boardroom by telephone. I must admit though that not everybody understands the image they are projecting to people during these Internet events.

There are more than couple dozen of these programs offered these days and I expect most offer an opportunity to check your image on screen before being connected to the meeting. You should. I remember a remote meeting of a parliamentary committee one day when the chair of the committee looked like he was working from a closet. I was particularly concerned watching that meeting when I thought one of the members in Toronto looked like she lived in a slum.

And yet, that weasel Pierre Poilievre saw the opportunities from the beginning. He always looked like he owned the finance committee when he was a member. He had the perfect (false) book-lined background, wore his trademark glasses, white shirt, red tie and the perfectly pressed blue suit. In comparison, there was a chairman once who looked like he had been waylaid on his way to work in his garden.

Please people, think about the impression you are making.

But before you do anything else check your lighting. There was recent meeting where I was worried about this lady in the semi-dark who seemed to be struggling with something. I finally realized that she was doing her nails. Tell me, would you want to hold a meeting in your bathroom? Proper lighting can be as simple as moving a lamp to make sure you look alive.

The one thing that does not change though is the role of the chair. It was a Zoom program we were using the other day and I was delighted with how simple it had become to join in the discussion. It was also obvious that the chair’s job had become much easier. If your program does not make notes for the chair though, a piece of paper and a pencil can help keep you advised as to your next speaker.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]

Promise Denied.

by Peter Lowry

When the Ontario Liberals last met in conclave in Hamilton this year, the attendees were told that the upcoming leadership vote would be one-member-one vote. No doubt many of us were delighted with that. I was not there for the announcement. As a senior, I could scrape together the $250 registration fee but at least $500 in meals and hotel in Hamilton was out of the question. It was not in the budget when facing food inflation at its most virulent stage.

But the executive of the liberal party broke their word. I only found out earlier this week that these dummies are artificially weighting the electoral districts. It is the same as the stupid conservatives. They give every riding a weight of 100. If your riding has more than 100 voters, you become a percentage with your vote. If your riding has less than 100 voters, then you are counted as one.

What they are doing is penalizing ridings that keep their membership up and adding legitimacy to the ridings that do little. If those Ontario liberals had paid attention to the last three leadership races of the federal conservatives, they might have had an inkling that there was something wrong with the procedure. Combined with a ranked ballot, it is a system guaranteed to produce a leader who can only be described as the lowest common denominator. In their last go-around, they probably dumped Patrick Brown from the race for fear that he might keep Pierre Poilievre from winning on the first ballot.

What I really cannot understand is why people who are supposedly supporting democracy can then accept the ballot counts reported by some computer nerds? Have you ever seen the actual results, by the numbers, of ranked ballots? The truth is that not everybody ranks any or all of the possibilities. Nor do many people study all of the possibilities and do an honest ranking?

A ranked ballot is a strange animal. The least contentious ranked ballots are when there are six or fewer candidates. These are easy to rank and usually take less time to count. You tend to trust the count. Try a ranked ballot with 20 candidates some time and follow the bouncing ball—because where it lands is anybody’s guess.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]

Tagging Team Nate.

by Peter Lowry

It was fun meeting with my local Nathanial Erskine-Smith committee (otherwise known as Team Nate) organizers earlier in last week. I did tell them I write this blog, so it should not surprise them if they see it. They might think of me as that cranky old man but I found it very interesting. This Team Nate group seems to span the central Ontario city of Barrie, towns of Orillia, Bradford and Newmarket and the rest of Simcoe County provincial electoral districts. Luckily, we used one of those new computerized group meeting programs and I was pleased with the ease of use, the excellent quality of the pictures in the rooms (that were adequately lit) and the ease of managing the meeting. Probably, the only discordant voice was mine.

Not that my decision to support Nate Erskine-Smith for the leadership of Ontario liberals has changed. I neither make those decisions too quickly, nor forego them if something does not necessarily, please me. My only caveat at the moment is that I still have not met Nate. I have followed his career in politics and I don’t think I am wrong to give him some support.

What Team Nate is targeting at the moment is party memberships. That would be no secret. Any of the teams that are not targeting membership at this time are not in the race. This is not where many groups shine. I have noticed over the years that if you don’t make it fun, rewarding and a whole team effort, it will fall flat on its ass.

I was a member of the York Scarborough group of ridings during the last half of the 20th Century. We made a rule at one point that for the first half-hour of gathering before a public meeting, no member of the executive was allowed to talk to another. You could only talk to people you had never talked with at a meeting before. We were always numbered in the thousand or more and we always had a great esprit de cours.

I guess that the pandemic has changed that now that we have meetings via computer. It worries me that we are losing the physical contact. I am looking forward to meeting Nate in person when he is in Barrie this week.

What I gleaned from the meeting was that one of the young ladies considered her working on her nails on a par with the meeting. Maybe that was why her background was particularly dark. She really worked hard on her nails.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to:

[email protected]