Category: New

Danielle’s Daily Dose.

by Peter Lowry

Reading news from Alberta makes you wonder just where the current premier gets her daily dose of news. Being a news junky myself, I seriously worry about Danielle Smith’s sources of information. If she continues to spout opinions without reference to where those ideas are coming from, she is going to end up bankrupting the province to pay her legal fees.

A good example is her recent diatribes against the World Economic Forum. Not only is her opinion of the organization so obviously based on ignorance but she is lucky the organization obviously does not give a damn what she thinks. Keep it up though, and they might.

But I prefer to wait until she decides that Alberta can ignore the recent federal gun law changes. Good luck fighting that one lady.

She keeps talking the talk but fighting the feds at the Supreme Court of Canada would obviously cost Alberta more than the federal government. That is home turf to the fed’s lawyers.

I guess a large part of the premier’s problem is that the major newspapers in Alberta are owned by the Postmedia chain. It is, in turn, owned by Americans who had their roots in the infamous National Inquirer. The American publications are under the umbrella of the former American Media company that has had a variety of names over the years possibly caused by law suits and bankruptcies. Just how Paul Godfrey got that bunch of American republicans involved in funding a group of Canadian newspapers, I cannot fathom. All I know is that, in the U.S., they are proud supporters of Mr. Trump and his sorry republicans.

I would trust the opinions of fellow blogger David Climenhaga, who writes on Alberta’s lack of political sense, before trusting any opinions from Postmedia.

Though I must admit, I am a bit disappointed not to have premier Jason Kenney to kick around anymore.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Freeland Fails.

by Peter Lowry

Before making her deputy prime minister and finance minister, did anyone check to see if Chrystia Freeland was really a liberal? She does not often talk like one. She sounds more like one of those blue liberals from Quebec. She is heading down the path of former finance minister and, briefly prime minister, Paul Martin.

Paul Martin betrayed the liberalism of his father. The shipping magnate from Montreal was reputed to have promoted the idea in Canadian politics that you campaign down the middle of the road and, once elected, veer to the right.

When an astute observer of political entrails as Chantal Hébert of the Toronto Star says that Freeland is a party-killer, people might start to listen. What Hébert really said was that Freeland is acting like the free-spending party of the early days of COVID 19 may be over.

This is at a time when what Canada really needs is a finance minister who can look ahead and see where this train is really headed.

Yes, some of the so-called financial experts are calling for a recession next year. It just does not make sense to help make the recession happen. And that is where Freeland is heading.

The problem is that we struggled enough to reach the point we are at with COVID. Nobody declared the pandemic over and done with. We are still battling variants. People are still dying. We are still inoculating people.

On top of that, our hospitals across this country are in desperate shape. They had their COVID along with ours. Freeland and her boss are going to have to come to the table with the provinces to help. The federal treasury needs to be raided to support the provinces. We can hardly let some right-wing provincial governments try to privatize parts of Medicare.

And as a favour, I will tell you where Freeland can get some of the money. Get it from the capitalist bastards who reaped unconscionable profits in the past year. They screwed the Canadian public out of that money and now we need some back. They can also make a contribution to the recovery.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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On the World Stage.

by Peter Lowry

Maybe we really do sometimes have the right actor in the right role. I was talking to a friend the other day about the war for the Ukraine. We began the discussion talking about the on-again, off-again career of former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson. My friend described Johnson as a clown who people laughed at. He said Johnson did not compare favourably to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy who is a professional comedian who people laugh with. We both agreed that the Ukraine was better off for having him.

There is also no question that president Zelenskyy has done a brilliant job of leadership during the Russian invasion. He stayed to lead his people. He has stonewalled the Russian juggernaut. He has used modern technology to lead while Russia’s Putin has relied on gross numbers and brutality.

And while Vladimir Putin has forsaken his humanity, Zelenskyy tells us that he struggles to maintain his. That humanity is obvious in every address he has made to his world-wide allies and the European Union. He knows how to maintain his honor while begging for more tools of war to defend his country.

But it is not just those weapons that Ukraine is using to stop Putin. The Russian troops are not on their own soil. Their enemies surround them. They need to keep looking over a shoulder. Sabotage is a Ukrainian defence. Anti-tank weapons have the time to be hidden. Drones flown by civilians are the early warning system. Every day that Putin’s rockets are killing civilians, the Ukrainians are killing his soldiers.

And what are the Russian soldiers fighting for? Is this their land? Will they be paid more for winning? Will their vodka ration improve? Will they be given land to farm? And who are they fighting for? Its not their brutal leadership. They think of Ukrainians as friends.

But it is a war that nobody can really win. Putin can resort to using nuclear weapons. That can cause nuclear Armageddon. The only people who can end this war with honour are the Russians themselves. They need to remove Putin from power and offer reparations to the Ukraine.

All we can do in this country is watch with horror and support Ukraine. We can hardly turn our backs on Zelenskyy’s Ukraine. War is never a solution.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

Policing Police.

by Peter Lowry

There is more than one benefit of the inquiry into the use of the emergencies act by Justice Paul Rouleau. It is showing how antiquated and inefficient our approach to policing is across Canada. I can only speak to the situation in Ontario but I have seen police actions across Canada and in other countries and I have seen nothing that I thought was a better solution. To go around saying, defund the police, is a foolish waste of time. As much as I admire many of those men and women who devote their working life to policing, we need to learn how they can serve us better.

And new thinking about policing in Canada needs to start at the top. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are an out-of-date anachronism. It is a poorly equipped quasi military force whose costumes are great for citizenship ceremonies and equestrian displays. They are probably more effective when carrying out their national policing responsibilities in mufti.

Policing of the provinces is a different matter. Ontario and Quebec both have overly politicized province-wide forces reporting to their provincial governments. They both seem to lack impartial judicial oversight. To send out young men and women from the RCMP’s Regina training depot to police other provinces is another serious error.

Growing up in Toronto, I saw many sides of Toronto’s municipal police. And it has always struck me that this is the level of policing that raises the more serious problems. I expect that the Toronto police never fell lower in Torontonian’s estimation than during the G-7 in Toronto in 2010. The police services boards are inadequate and are more a system of protecting the police and ensuring adequate budgets, than any level of management. We put a hell of a lot of responsibility on chiefs of police and not enough on the police services boards that hire and fire them.

And as the Rouleau inquiry in Ottawa appears to be indicating, we certainly need better coordination between the different police forces. We also need better civilian oversight of all levels of policing and faster action to contain circumstances such as blockades that impede the normal flow of commerce and citizens.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Bring Back Boris?

by Peter Lowry

It must be the bookies who are running the United Kingdom these days. They are giving 2-to-1 odds on Boris Johnson returning to 10 Downing Street. The Truss solution did not work. Since trusses are often used to lessen the pain of a hernia, it was hopefully assumed she might fix the UK’s herniated economy. Truss gave the UK economy the hiccups. She only made the pain worse.

But Johnson can only be described as a return to a continuing path to disaster for the UK. He has not known where he was headed since Brexit. He neither understands the economic chaos caused by Brexit nor how to alleviate it.

Johnson is not just a man in desperate need of a good barber. He needs some brains to tuck under that mop of hair.

But, sure, bring back Boris. That guarantees the earliest possible exit of Scotland and maybe Northern Ireland from the united islands. Finding him a safe seat to run for re-election next year might be his biggest problem. Re-electing the conservatives would only be his second biggest problem. His third electoral problem is that he is the only UK prime minister to have been found guilty of breaking the law while in office.

Boris made a bollix of negotiating Britain out of European Union. The Brits seem to like him because he is the farthest from the typically reserved Brit you will ever meet. As foreign minister in Theresa May’s cabinet, he insulted friends and showed little judgement. He was famous for making a racist statement about U.S. President Barack Obama and has won the UK no new friends on the European continent.

While there is little sympathy for the UK bookmakers. Their early odds (when a comeback for Boris was considered much less likely) were taken up so heavily that the loss on payouts could be catastrophic.

But who worries about the bookies when the entire country is falling apart?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Freeland’s Faux Pas.

by Peter Lowry

Where does finance minister Chrystia Freeland get off boosting one of conservative Pierre Poilievre’s dumber ideas? We thought he was stupid to say that, under a conservative regime, there would be no new expenditures without equivalent cuts in other programs. And now we learn that Freeland is making it a directive to her cabinet colleagues.

There is no shorter route to a recession than for everyone to stop spending. If she does not know that, then she and her advisors should all be fired.

And how can Canadians stop spending? They are being ripped off by the oil companies and the food chain. When unconscionable profits are not stopped by her government, what gives her the right to inflict more harm on us?

Canada needs investment, not recession. We need clean energy infrastructure. We need high-speed electric trains replacing fossil-fueled airplanes. We need electric vehicles of all types. We need inexpensive, energy-conserving homes. We need reasonably priced rental accommodation. We need to protect our farmland.

Freeland doesn’t seem to understand that you learn from the past and you build for the future. She needs to understand that if Canadians want to forsake the future, they need only vote conservative. And if they wanted a further lift back into the past, they could vote for the new democrats.

I believe I read something about her latest foolishness in connection with a speech in Washington. It seemed to ask American lawmakers for their approval of her road to recession. It would certainly get rave reviews from the Trump republicans. Anything that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer seems to please those idiots.

And, frankly, Canadians are sick and tired of the stupid conservative assertion that government spending, during the worst of the pandemic, was the cause of the current world inflation. Government spending had very much to do with how well we got through the first waves of the pandemic and very little to do with the current inflation. The breakdown of the world-wide distribution system, the greed of some industries and world tensions have caused the inflation. And Ms. Freeland and her finance department staff are not helping.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Apprentice.

by Peter Lowry

No film influenced me for life more than Walt Disney’s Fantasia. The 1941 animated film gave me a lifelong love of classical music. And it also provided lifelong images of hippos in tutus and a perplexed Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I was young and impressionable at the time.

But I was thinking recently of Ontario premier Doug Ford, who is built like a hippopotamus, and his apprenticeship. It is unlikely that many of the people who voted for his conservatives in the last provincial election could visualize him in a tutu. Nor would they realize the lack of training he had in how to do premiering.

Doug Ford is a salesman who believes bluster beats brains. He had to have back-up for those announcements during the worst of the pandemic. He is a private person in a public job. He saw the prestige his father gained through being a member of the legislature and never understood the work involved.

Whatever Doug Ford knows about politics, he learned from his younger brother. It was a wild apprenticeship at Toronto City Hall. When Rob Ford died in 2016, he left his brother Doug as a loose cannon in Canadian politics. As the apprentice, Doug had tried to step into Rob’s shoes in the Toronto mayoralty and lost to a better politician John Tory.

One gets the impression that if Doug Ford was paid by the hour for the actual time he puts into being premier of Ontario, he would starve to death. There is nothing he wants to reveal to Justice Rouleau’s commission into the emergencies act. He spent most of that time in question wondering what to do.

All he did about the shut-down of the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor was bluster. It was the emergency act that got the Ontario provincial police to clear the blockade.

Doug Ford is probably unaware that the use of the act saved his backside. And if he had ever faced any real opposition at Queen’s Park, he would have been back to selling labels long ago.

I have this wonderful image of an endless line of brooms with scrub pails marching down the central staircase at Queen’s Park and a hapless Doug Ford standing at the door demanding that they stop.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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For Whom Bell Tolls?

by Peter Lowry

It was 22 years ago that Bell Canada spun off Nortel—the jewel in Canada’s communications crown. What Jean Monty of Bell Canada really did was to dismiss Canada’s world leadership in a company that was key to Bell Canada’s future and the future of telecommunications in Canada.

What started out as Northern Electric in 1895, that was a joint operation of Western Electric in the U.S. and Bell Canada and segued into Bell Northern Research and then Nortel Networks. It was the golden goose. Monty, as head of Bell Canada, cut its throat and then cut it adrift. A cornucopia of some 6000 active patents were feasted on by the world’s, mainly U.S., telecoms and computer companies for just $4.5 billion. Nortel Networks officially died in 2011.

What brings this to mind today was the announcement earlier in the week by Finland’s giant telecom equipment supplier Nokia of a $340 million research hub in Kanata, Ontario. And since politicians never learn from their mistakes, the federal, provincial and municipal governments are kicking in a gift of $72 million to get the project moving. And the excuse was that Nokia can provide fifth generation equipment across the networks.

Platitudes, of course, were proffered by the prime minister, the premier of Ontario and the mayor of Kanata. It all has something to do with deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s approach to only doing business with friends and allies who are democratic. It seems counter to the old chestnut that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Personally, I think Ms. Freeland is wrong. In present world conditions, I think we need to attempt to restore friendly relations with China. And when Russia gets rid of the foolish Mr. Putin and makes peace with the Ukraine, we should quickly restore our former relations with that country. Canada has proved its abilities in wars and it has proved its capabilities as a peacekeeper. We also need to prove to countries outside of the Americas that we can be a good friend.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Blame Game.

by Peter Lowry

It is like making sausage. You really did not want to dig into the process. That is what Justice Paul Rouleau and his ‘Freedom Convoy’ Inquiry has gotten into. The vulgar, but technical enough, term for what happened in Ottawa last February appears to be a CLUSTER-F**K. The list of the guilty appears to cover all three levels of government, politicians and their servants alike.

And nobody can spread the blame more thoroughly than civil servants. They know the nuances of political speak. They know what memos to incinerate and which to discover. They know who should be called as witnesses and who to hide. They know who to impeach and whom to protect.

And why is premier Ford not on the witness list? It was his ministers and his employees who fumbled the blockade at the vital Ambassador Bridge. It was his incompetent minister who ignored pleas from the City of Ottawa. And we can only hope that Justice Rouleau spends some time discussing the disgusting lack of intelligence sharing between the RCMP, OPP and Ottawa Police Services.

But we should have no sympathy for the Ottawa police chief who let his cops collapse in the face of numbers. Any military strategist could have told him that when you don’t have the numbers, you need to use your brain. It is not just there to hold up your brass hat.

And they could have brought in MP Bill Blair. He was the guy who let his expanded force kettle innocent civilians during the G7 meeting in Toronto back in 2010. (And he did not even need an emergency act.)

Even MP Marco Mendicino, minister of public safety, could have been helpful in discussing some legal avenues open to the Ottawa Police Services. Why he was not in the forefront of the federal government response to the convoy is a question Justice Rouleau should ask him.

We were cheering when the emergency act was applied. We watched, delighted, the methods of the enlarged police action. It took only one foray by Toronto’s Police equestrian team to show that horses might be old fashioned but they sure scared those truckers. It was the best television show we had seen since before the pandemic.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Following the Math.

by Peter Lowry

I made a mistake last week and you would have thought I would have had a bunch of e-mails having a laugh at my expense. I got none. It was only today that I realized the error. The earlier commentary had stuck in my mind and I checked back on it to see if there was a logical bridge to re-introduce the subject.

What I found was a silly error. I was writing about the penchant of conservatives to use preferential voting. I checked a report on the Alberta leadership voting and it said there were six vote counts for the six candidates. That did not seem right but I was rushed. I still had the thought in the back of my mind that I was saying something wrong when I posted that blog.

It was only today when I reread the blog that the error was clear; you can’t have six counts for six candidates. And besides, I knew that there were seven candidates to replace Jason Kenney.

But the point of that commentary was to reinforce my argument that in preferential voting, the losers in the race can, too often, be the choosers. And, it was the losers who chose Danielle Smith.

Smith was in the race all the way to the sixth ballot count. It was that final count that gave Smith over 50 per cent. She won by 53.77 per cent. That meant that she only won by being the second, third, fourth or fifth choice of voters who actually preferred one of the other candidates.

What always seems to be left out of the party’s reporting is the number of ballots in this final count. There must have been many ballots without all the choices indicated. They might have counted over 85,000 first votes but some of the ballots would not have all seven preferences. That means they had to be set aside in the later counts.

I have attended more than a few liberal party leaderships and been an observer at those for other parties. Many were delegated conventions when a sub-set of party members were elected to make the decision. I was always appalled at the sleaziness of deals that saw losers go openly to this opponent or that one. I always believed that delegates needed time to reassess the needs of the party—not the directions of a failed candidate.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]