New – Page 164 – Babel-on-the-Bay

Pushing mediocrity to prove what?

October 25, 2018 by Peter Lowry

If I learned one thing as a political organizer of many years, it is that you never leave the smallest detail to chance. The same rule applied in business when I had computer programmers reporting to me. I never let a program be released until it had been given a thorough workout under extremely difficult conditions. It is irresponsible to leave anything to chance. I really believe that the weakest link in any chain is the one you have not tested.

This comes to mind as we learn about what really happened in some experiments in voting in Ontario municipalities on Monday. This includes the ludicrous attempt at preferential voting in London as well as the well-meaning test by 51 smaller municipalities of computerized voting.

When we found out that London was going to run the program on Tuesday to find out who was mayor, we were totally confused. They could have done the job faster if they had counted by hand. All preferential voting does is drill down in the preferences of those who voted for losers, to find out who they chose as their next bad choice. It is the best way we know to find the most mediocre people to elect.

London councillors will have to delve into the weakness of the system they used that took two days to choose a mayor. Two other municipalities, Cambridge and Kingston, had questions on the ballot asking voters if they would like to try ranked voting in 2022. Cambridge did not have enough voters answer the question but Kingston voted ‘yes.’ Hopefully the Kingston councillors will come to their senses before 2022 and kill the idea.

It turns out that, for some strange reason, the firm handling the voting for the 51 smaller municipalities used a single computer centre for the voting. Obviously, the total votes anticipated was not the problem. The problem is that you never use a single data centre for something so critical. (It reminds me of the time in the 1970s we were testing a computer reporting approach for a provincial election in Prince Edward Island. The nearest data centre with the power to handle the programs was at Dalhousie University in Halifax. The polls closed at 8 pm and, for some reason, so did the Island telephone lines under the Northumberland Strait.)

Fiber optics have greatly improved bandwidth and reliability since those days but it never hurts to have redundancy on top of redundancy.

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Follow the money to Brampton Brown.

October 24, 2018 by Peter Lowry

He used to be Barrie Brown. His best friend, Toronto lawyer Walied Soliman describes him in the Toronto Star as the “hardest working person, I have ever met.” Those of us who have watched Brown manipulate his way through politics over the years are less complimentary. This is not the kind of politician you should trust.

The main concern about Patrick Brown’s career in politics is where the money comes from. It took him two tries to latch onto the Harper bandwagon in 2006, dump his job as a city councillor in Barrie and get elected as the member of parliament for Barrie and area.

He became known as a retail politician. He did what he was told in Ottawa and worked at getting in solid in Barrie. He used local charities as his publicity base and never got involved in political controversy. Studying his financial reports in elections, I found he was creative but there was nothing major to complain about. The main concern was that it was such a waste of time sending him to Ottawa.

But the plan was emerging. His friend Jason Kenney, then minister of ethnic support for prime minister Stephen Harper, suggested that Brown spend some effort getting to know the people from the Indian Sub-Continent. It was the Canadian taxpayers who paid for Patrick Brown’s trips to India. All he had to do was stay out of all the ethnic troubles of that part of the world.

What it enabled Brown to do was build up a large base of support and knowledge of those groups in Canada. That is why his first office to capture the Ontario conservative leadership was in Brampton. With more than 260,000 South Asian immigrants and descendants in Brampton, they represented 44 per cent of the total population.

And that was when we started to seriously question where the money was from? You hardly go over night from raising $100,000 for a federal election campaign to raising over a million for the provincial leadership. His South Asian organizers paid the memberships of close to 40,000 people across Ontario. Where did that money come from?

And where did the money come from at the time for Patrick Brown to acquire a mansion out in Shanty Bay? This is not a guy known for saving his nickels.

And skipping over the problems of January 2018, where did the money come from for a failed attempt to take over as chair of Peel Region? That is not a small area to put up signs.

And finally, where did the money come from for that very expensive campaign in the City of Brampton?

Enquiring minds want to know.

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Brown’s boy continues to disappoint.

October 23, 2018 by Peter Lowry

It was always amusing to see how aspiring politician Alex Nuttall fawned on Patrick Brown as heir apparent to Patrick’s seat in parliament. It did not seem to be a sure thing with their respective ages being so close. All became clear though when Patrick jumped on the provincial leadership bandwagon. My neighbours and I got the dirty end of the stick when Mr. Nuttall told us he was our new conservative candidate in Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte.

The fact of his slim win by 89 votes out of the rural area of the electoral district was a clear indication of the city folks’ opinion of Mr. Nuttall. We knew Mr. Nuttall best. And he has certainly not done anything important for anybody, city or rural, since.

At a time when Barrie residents are increasingly concerned about the late-night disturbances downtown, the drunkenness, the open prostitution, as well as growing drug problems and deaths, our MP, Alex Nuttall has turned a blind eye to our concerns.

The weekly grocery ad wrap that passes for a newspaper now in Barrie, found out that Nuttall thinks federally approved safe injection sites for drug addicts are illegal. The Simcoe County health unit considers a safe injection site as a ‘harm prevention’ priority for Barrie that can save many lives. The city has to wait for the provincial government’s approval of it but nobody knows what that government will do from one day to the next. (Health minister Christine Elliott said the other day that we will keep some sites but did not say where.)

Mr. Nuttall has absolutely no idea what to do about drug addiction but does not think safe injection sites are the answer. He would probably appear a lot smarter if he just shut up.

All we know is that safe injection sites can save lives. They build rapport with the addicts to the point where the professionals can start to communicate and can help them. It works and is a solution that does not leave people on the street to die.

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Dougie did it!

October 22, 2018 by Peter Lowry

There is an explanation for this. I have a younger brother whose name happens to be Douglas. When we were young, the standard answer to a bloody nose or a broken lamp was always “Dougie did it.” I can admit now that if the fresh blood was mine, I could easily blame him. Mother was very wary though of these claims when it looked like Dougie lost the fight.

But Dougie always was mother’s favourite. I felt hard done by when the fact was that my older sister and three older brothers could treat me as their Sherpa but I was not allowed to pick on Dougie. And he had the last laugh because he was the first in the family with a PhD.

The point of this is that I am not trying to belittle Ontario premier Douglas Ford by casually referring to him as Dougie. I am delighted today that I can say “Dougie did it” and mean it. It is certainly not my brother’s fault. He is now a retired academic living in Ohio where he lectured business students for many years.

One of the subjects I have discussed seriously with him over the years has been ethics in business and politics. When he was teaching in Ontario, I was welcome to go to Waterloo and lecture his business class.

I like to think I have contributed something to better ethics in business over the years but I tend to despair with politics. Frankly the leadership of the Ontario conservatives has been beyond redemption for the last several years.

While I believed that Patrick Brown might have just been diddling his expenses occasionally, there is really no excuse for someone such as Doug Ford. Doug Ford is a liar, a charlatan, an ignorant boor and a disgrace as premier of Ontario.

In his case, ‘Dougie’ is not an endearment.

Do you know that he promised observant Sikhs the other day that they can kill themselves on motorcycles.

I never knew a religion that wanted to fast-track the ‘Right to Die’ with anything other than KoolAid. Dougie actually told the Sikh community in the Brampton area that Sikh males could now use their turbans as helmets when they ride their motorcycles. That was not only flagrantly discriminatory and sexist but it was colossally stupid.

It was no wonder that he tried not to let non-Punjabi language media know about the plan. Ontario’s Dougie knows how to pander for votes!

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A relentless push for change.

October 21, 2018 by Peter Lowry

As best as I can follow the Google Analytics information about readership, there is a consistent and steady stream of world wide web users visiting the Democracy Papers. I wrote these papers in 2007 for the provincial referendum on voting in Ontario. It looks like more than 30,000 individual readers from around the world have accessed those papers in the years following. I think my words are ending up on political science tests around the world. Yet, they are not academic efforts. They are for anyone who is curious about voting systems.

In addition to those archived materials, I periodically comment in Babel-on-the-Bay on people’s strange ideas about voting systems. This seems to always provide me with fresh rants from people who dislike our first-past-the-post system of voting.

I quite understand the complaints. To paraphrase Winston Churchill as he once said about democracy. “It is not all that good a system; it is just better than the alternatives.”

But I will always defend the concept of having our local candidate who goes to the government for us. That is a key to our democracy and I will always defend it.

At the same time, I do understand the concerns of those who want change.

My only solution, for those who will take any improvement, is run-off elections. Many try to convince me of alternative voting as an inexpensive approach to this but it is really not the same. Alternative voting is where you can number your choices as 1, 2, 3, etc. and if you have ten candidates in your district, you can number all ten.

What bothers me the most about numbering the choices is that it is difficult for the voter to find out enough about some candidates to rank them. It has to be explained to voters that they only need to rank those candidates they would find acceptable.

And while there are those who think it is a bumper-sticker answer, alternative voting systems can make the losers the choosers. Run-off elections keep everyone in the same driver’s seat. It gives every voter the chance to make their choice anew. And in an era when we will all be switching to Internet voting, the costs of making up your mind again will be minimal. I expect it will be initially resisted by the politicians to the right of the political spectrum but they are natural pessimists and it might surprise them that this system can work for them too. It is better than the alternatives.

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Voting for the future?

October 20, 2018 by Peter Lowry

It has always been my observation that there are fewer ‘Come line’ bettors in municipal voting than ‘No line’ bettors. If you are not a craps player, I should explain that there are fewer civic voters voting positively for the future than there are people expressing themselves with a negative vote. (I should also mention that the ‘No’ side in craps gets slightly better odds.)

Despite this seeming negative advantage in craps, the casino still makes money on the game from what gamblers get hooked on, which are the propositions. These are all those funny markings in the middle of the craps layout that players throw chips at the stick-person to place for them.

But it has always been my observation that municipal politics is far more of a crap shoot than people realize. We elect people in municipal elections on far less information than a McDonalds’ would require from a teenager wanting an after-school job. We use rumour and name recognition to pay someone an outrageous sum and we cannot even fire them for four years.

I mention all this in response to the Toronto Star promoting the paper’s own version of confusion in how they promote candidates for office. I have noticed lately that columnists who might never have been to a city council meeting (or stayed very long) are now telling us how to vote for their candidate.

The best example recently was an op-ed piece by the Toronto Star’s Heather Mallick promoting Jennifer Keesmaat for mayor. Frankly, Keesmaat might not be the super solution that Mallick suggests. She would hardly be the first civic employee who thought she could do a better job than that bunch of elected screw-ups. I would like to know what she could not do as an employee that she could now do in the mayor’s chair?

The reason I say this is because Mallick is impressed with Keesmaat’ s level of planning in her plans for transit. Suggesting that Keesmaat must be better because she has made ten promises in regard to transit and John Tory has only four. Maybe Mallick should realize that Tory has a far better chance to achieve what he promises. Keesmaat has a lot to learn.

And if she had a way to get the downtown relief line for the Toronto subway system built three years sooner, she should have pushed for it back when she worked for the city.

Toronto is a rapidly growing city that needs a better form of governance. We need people who understand the problems and can help. Toronto news media need to fight for better governance—not encourage dilettante reporters to pitch their unqualified favourites.

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Cost of challenging climate change.

October 19, 2018 by Peter Lowry

The bills keep rolling in. Dougie and the Deplorables should take their show on tour and give things a rest at Queen’s Park. This provincial government, that ran on promises of saving us taxpayers money, ran up bills over the summer that make the previous liberal regime look like pikers.

And to make matters worse, this new conservative government spent most of the money on cancelling the efforts of the previous liberals. You would at least hope that the liberals did something right?

But Dougie had a very expensive summer. He has added billions to the provincial budget. He could have to tax us another 20 billion or so, just to balance the books. It was as though he was searching for opportunities to add on debt and blame it on those spendthrift liberals. The immediate bill for cancelling the Ontario cap and trade carbon controlling deal with California and Quebec is over three billion.

What Dougie is going to cost us in law suits and failed opportunities in tax revenues keeps mounting. He no sooner launches his own supreme court challenge to the federal government’s suggested carbon tax but he heads out west and offers to also spend money on the climate change primates in their Alberta and Saskatchewan’s court challenges.

Hell, we do not even know what a lot of pending law suits against the new Ontario government are going to cost us. They range from the strange firing-cum-retirement of the guy running Hydro One to the parents tired of being ‘coitused’ around by Dougie over sex education for their children. Everybody seems to want to have a piece of Dougie’s ass.

And I certainly would not recommend to him that he stick his big nose into things at Toronto city hall very soon. Those people are ‘mad as hell, and not going to take it any more.’ Since the premier seems to have a legal right to ‘coitus’ around with the number of councillors on city councils in Ontario, I am not sure it is law suits that he need worry about.

I am not at all sure that the premier is anywhere near done ‘coitusing’ us.

His promise to save us a bit on gasoline prices disappeared into the pockets of the oil companies. Similar to his foolish ‘buck-a-beer’ promise, it was a waste of time and something he could do little to control.

No doubt Dougie has lots of little surprises for us over the next four years. I just hope we can afford them.

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Thumper: 1932 to 2018

October 18, 2018 by Peter Lowry

The Hon. Donald S. Macdonald has died. We were never friends. He might have served in Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet and we were both Torontonians but we never exchanged much more than the odd slight. I found him very elitist, right-wing and the kind of Rosedale warrior that was a pain in the ass. To be fair, he mainly ignored me.

But, he is dead and I should think of something nice to say about him. The good news is I do not intend to go to his funeral.

Surprisingly I got my early push in politics from Rosedale residents who were close to Don. My late friend Joe Potts and I managed to get ourselves into and out of trouble until Joe got his appointment to the bench and he was no longer allowed to play with political riff-raff.

But this story is about Thumper. And, by the way, I called him “Thumper” after that rabbit in the story of Disney’s Bambi. I never looked at his feet. Thumper was always raising alarms.

The final straw was Don’s acceptance in 1982 of the the chair of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada. He had quit politics four years earlier to return to law but accepted Pierre Trudeau’s appointment for a reputed $800 per day.

I hope he was docked for the $800 on the day I was making my presentation to the commission. No reason was given, he never showed up. With a pitch entitled ‘Towards A New Capitalism’ I should not have expected any special treatment.

I hardly think it was just my lack of enthusiasm for free trade with the U.S.A. that led Don to suggest that “leap of faith” in free trade in his report. I saw it as a give-away to a country that did not even believe in fair trade. I felt we were setting ourselves up to be bullied.

I thought Don was pleased that he did not have to hand his report to the much smarter Pierre Trudeau. Instead, Brian Mulroney, the patsy PM for the Americans, was the ideal recipient of his inelegant tome.

But I still need something positive. I was going to mention the bow ties but the first time I saw Don in a bow tie was after the 1962 election when he was first elected. It was at a function for prime minister Lester Pearson. I though Don was kissing up to the boss and his traditional bow tie.

I can apologize now because I found out later that Don really liked bow ties. I hope he is wearing one for the funeral.

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This honour might not be justified.

October 17, 2018 by Peter Lowry

There was an e-mail the other day informing me that Babel-on-the-Bay is being honoured for its support of U.S. Supreme Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Good God! Did I? When? Why? And why do I not remember committing such a heinous crime?

The e-mail is detailed and serious. It is from some right-wing crazies, based in Washington, D.C., called Judicial Watch. All I know about them is they spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to get Hillary Clinton locked up.

To tell the truth, I do not recall writing anything about the U.S. judge. He is just another example of a highly politicized judicial system that is going downhill fast. I was appalled at his undisciplined display of anger in his appearance before the U.S. Senate committee. I knew nothing else about him and I had nothing insightful to say about him.

But here is Judicial Watch congratulating me on “the role you have played in getting out the truth.” I wish.

They claim “The leftwing (sic) members of the Senate violated every rule of proper procedures and basic decency…” I guess those senators will be next after they lock up Hillary Clinton.

It seems these Judicial Watch people have been putting together an obviously extensive list of blogs that they think will be a force for conservatism and Donald Trump. And this is “right when America needs us most!”

But here I am being feted by these people for “the role you have played in getting out the truth… And changing the course of history.”

Judicial Watch is going to expand its Blog Watch website to accommodate every blog I and my fellow conservative(?) bloggers do on any issue involving government corruption, election integrity, illegal immigration and terrorism. They promise to put them front and centre on their website. They will even e-mail the blogs to their entire list of some 40,000 names on their press(?) list. They want to share my commentaries with their 5 million Facebook followers, one million Twitter followers and 60,000 Instagram followers.

I know this will come as no surprise to regular readers of Babel-on-the-Bay, but the question is: should I tell these brain-dead, right-wing dingbats that I am a Canadian? And, to make it worse, I really am a left-wing liberal?

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Bloomberg boo-boos big.

October 16, 2018 by Peter Lowry

How do you get to be the 11^th richest man in the world and have employees who make ridiculous mistakes? I hate to embarrass a guy such as Michael Bloomberg but he put his name on Bloomberg News to try to give it some credibility. Of its current 20,000-plus employees, he needs to hire some knowledgeable editors to make sure the reporters get it right.

On October 12, I came across a business news article that was clearly credited to Bloomberg News. While the headline writer might have been local, it stated that Chinese companies were loading up on a Canadian bargain: Along with saving about US$ 50 a barrel, Asian refineries “want Western crude’s rich bitumen.” At first, I thought it was just a headline writer’s error.

But no, the story actually was written as to give the impression that bitumen came from Western Canada’s crude oil. Not only that but the writer suggested that bitumen was itself desirable as “a black residue used to build everything from roads, to runways and roofing.” That is correct in that those are traditional uses for bitumen. The writer could also have noted that the ancient Phoenicians also used bitumen to caulk the bottoms of their galleys that plied the Mediterranean.

But bitumen is also a source of synthetic crude oil. I sincerely doubt that anyone would ever want to figure out a method to add carbon molecules to crude oil to turn it into bitumen. As it is, refineries converting bitumen to synthetic crude oil end up with huge piles of what is known as bitumen slag that is almost pure carbon. It is one of the most polluting processes in the refining industry. It would certainly be a strange commodity to promote through one of Michael Bloomberg’s companies, when he has such an impressive reputation as an environmentalist.

One of the reasons for the renewed interest in Asia for Canadian bitumen is the current unrest in Venezuela. Venezuela has what many believe are much larger reserves of high-grade bitumen-like oil, that is often referred to as extra heavy oil. It is easier to refine and leaves less pollution in its path.

And if Bloomberg wants to write about the world oil industry, it should make sure its reporters know what they are talking about.

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Argumentum ad absurdum

Having written the foregoing about Bloomberg’s confusion about bitumen over the weekend, imagine my surprise Monday morning when David Olive of the Toronto Star used the same incorrect information. He could at least have credited the Bloomberg article as his source. The Toronto Star editors even used the same Canadian Press picture to illustrate Olive’s story.

I am not accusing David Olive of plagiarism here but he certainly needs to check his sources better. He should be well aware that Western Canada Select and Canadian Heavy Oil are just tar sands companies’ euphemisms for tar sands bitumen.

It is nice to know that David Olive is also bullish for bitumen—it goes so well with the Toronto Star’s hypocrisy about global warming.

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