Category: New

It Begins on Your Street.

by Peter Lowry

Looking ahead to 2024, writing a political blog will be a year of many challenges. There is no social code that forbids us from talking either of religion or politics.  Canadians will keep their eyes peeled on the events to the south. We will watch Mr. Trump trying desperately to confound his enemies and his own party of the right.

We will also watch the bumbles and stumbles of the Brexiters of the United Kingdom. And we will watch for the shifting sands of the Middle East and the political whims of the Continent. We will wait to see how the Russians will deal with loser Putin and wonder at who will be heir to Xi Jinping in China.

But it is here on our street where the reality of politics takes meaning. Will the autistic child two doors down get the understanding help he needs? Will the old lady next door quietly die when her RRIFs run dry? Will the teacher three doors further down get to catch up with the rising cost of living. Did the nurse in apartment 202 get the job she wanted in the United States? When you think about it, everyone has their story and those stories might all be political.

In Ontario, we know that the conservative government is not here for us. They are there for their developer friends who want cheap land out of the Greenbelt to build over-priced homes. These same provincial politicians give their conservative lawyer friends a false title such as a KC for King’s Councel. They make a secret deal with a European spa and give away the people’s Ontario Place.

But maybe we are better off in Ontario where the provincial government does not discriminate between Canada’s official languages. There’s no ‘live and let live’ in the Province of Quebec.

Maybe we can all move to Alberta with it’s laugh a minute ‘Looney Tunes’ premier. She is going to spend all that ill-gotten, polluting oil money fighting the federal government over their efforts to save our earthly environment. She is a separatist with no place to go with her land-locked Alberta—that was created by the feds. She has never acknowledged the gift of billions in the shape of the Trans Mountain Pipeline.

Many years ago, we had a politician who told us “The land is strong.” Nobody knew what he meant. Now we have one who tells us to “Bring it home.” Who knows what mysteries that slogan could hold for us?

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Imagine Toronto.

by Peter Lowry

Toronto, a city on the north side of Lake Ontario, is not a planned city. It is more of a happening place than people realize. After many years of haphazard approvals by myopic city councils, Toronto has become interesting, challenging and a city with a great future.

But, like any challenging project serving millions of people, Toronto will never be finished. A city has to be a living organism. It needs constant updating and change. It does not stand still. It is not historic. It is forward looking to its future.

And a city such as that needs politicians who can look to the future. For every naysayer on council, it needs visionaries. For every bicycle enthusiast, it needs the practical people who see the need to speed delivery trucks and people movers.

And a city thrives on action. It is a happening place. It can plan, it can let happen, it can share joy and share despair. It can be a place for theatres and a place for buskers. It is a place that rejoices in births and shares the sorrow of death.

A city has sports enthusiasts and libraries. It has theatrical performances and concerts. It has movie theatres and gymnasiums. It has food stores and restaurants. And those restaurants in Toronto serve the foods from around the world. Food truck vendors will sell you poutine or falafel, or hot dogs.   

It is a city of learning and education, of colleges and universities, of study and research. There is full day kindergarten and handy grammar schools. There are high schools for commerce and for the sciences and leading to higher education.

It is a city of clean cool water and breathable air. It is a city that sweeps its streets and allows no buildup on the roads of ice or snow.

It is a fashion-conscious city, dressing to the nines, with stores for the practical and for the flamboyant. It is a city that dresses for warmth in the winters and shows deepening skin tones in the summer.

It is a city of towering condominiums and single-family dwellings, of triplexes and townhouses in distinct neighbourhoods. They house people of all religions, of all colours, and a myriad of languages, with English as the lingua franca.

Today, I live in a city an hour north of Toronto. Toronto still feels like home.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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Harry Remembered.

by Peter Lowry

It was actually Lou Rosen, I first met. We were in that little custom tailoring shop he and brother Harry had opened on Parliament Street in Toronto. A fellow salesman and friend had convinced me to get away from Eaton’s menswear racks and check out custom tailoring. I went in with him but kept a tight hand on my wallet. I wasn’t too worried though. Parliament street was definitely in the lower price ranges.

It was Harry Rosen, himself, who sold me. He joined our conversation about custom tailoring versus off-the-rack and said, “Do you want to see the difference?”

When I said ‘yes,’ all he did was take off his suit coat.

Harry was no Charles Atlas. He was almost as pudgy as myself. His point for custom tailoring was made without another word. It reformed me and moved me up in the world. Those suits from Harry Rosen stores over the years spelled success in so many ways.

Only once did I falter and give into my brother John’s insistence that I give Lou Miles in his Yonge Street store a trial. Lou Miles was a great guy but those tight Italian style suits were never made for my somewhat oversized belly. They were a great fit for my skinny brother, but I went back to another of Harry’s new stores. There, I was at home.

I remember a long chat I had with Harry one day on Richmond Street near his store number two. It was one of many stores at this time. I was on the way to Hy’s for a luncheon appointment. The business appointment could wait. I always enjoyed chatting with Harry when I had a chance. He was working with some friends of mine in the advertising business and he was becoming a household name in menswear.

It is probably more than thirty years now since I last bought a Harry Rosen suit. That last one hangs in my closet. Last time I had it on, I realized how much I had shrunk.  I will probably be buried in it. Living north of Ontario Highway 7, you only wear a suit for serious funerals. I expect I have forgotten how to tie a Windsor knot for a tie.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Justin’s Journey.

by Peter Lowry

It might not please all Canadians that our prime minister is staying the course and sticking around for another election. I have listened to his claims of certitude and I cannot help but feel that he does not have the good sense of his father.  While I would not have wanted Pierre Trudeau’s logical mind running things during the pandemic, I felt that Justin Trudeau’s love of acting was perfect to help Canadians during that critical time of needing understanding and direction.

But his father knew when the time had come to go. He resigned as liberal leader twice. First was when when his government was defeated by a minority Joe Clark government and then again after his famous ‘walk in the snow.’

The first time I met Justin, I was running a fund-raising dinner for the Barrie liberals. We chatted over dinner and I quickly learned much about him. Both the wife and I agreed afterwards that he was more like his mother than his father. It was obvious that he would be seeking the leadership of the party. His speech really told you nothing. It was the type of speech I hated writing for politicians. I could have sworn that he had a switch somewhere on him that he could turn on and off when doing that type of thing.

What worries me about Justin’s obduracy is that he has destroyed the effectiveness of the liberal party for the upcoming election. He might not be ready to step down but his confidence is not shared by the liberal party. From what I have seen in Ontario, he has lost much of the muscle of the party to handle the kind of election Mr. Poilievre wants to engage. We have lost all those effective fund-raisers in the Senate. We have lost their knowledge and influence.

And just where does Justin think we are going to find the young, tireless workers, to knock on doors and distribute material. The Ontario liberals had a leadership contest recently and the contestants actually doubled the free provincial membership to over 100,000 people who said they wanted to vote for a leadership candidate.

But when push came to shove, they failed miserably in getting those free members out to vote. If you know who is going to vote for you, you organize to get those votes in the ballot boxes. Less than 25 per cent of those ‘liberals’ got to the polls. They paid nothing. They had no commitment.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

‘Bring It Home.’

by Peter Lowry

What does “Bring it home” mean to you? Does Mr. Poilievre’s keynote slogan have specificity for you? Is it a meaningful political doctrine? Or, is it just another vague slogan that can mean what you want it to mean?

But the cold, hard facts are that slogans are for the gullible. Slogans replace logic.

Take ‘Axe the Tax.’ This is taking many liberties with the facts. It is fixed on the idea that nobody wants to pay any taxes. Anybody with any common sense knows that you can hardly run a country successfully where nobody pays any taxes. What we already know is that the tax he wants to axe is not a tax. It is simply a penalty that industries pay for the carbon they are putting into the earth’s atmosphere. They obviously pass these charges on to their customers, so the government gives the money collected from the industries to the taxpayers. The taxpayer is expected to want to use less of these products, thereby cutting down on the damage to our environment.

When you consider all this, you realize that Mr. Poilievre is not promising to axe a tax on you but on an industry that is polluting our environment. Think about it. Why would Mr. Poilievre want to axe a tax on these industries. Why doesn’t he worry about the pollution they are causing? Does he want to be prime minister of Canada for them or for you?

Let’s go back to what “Bring it home” means. I don’t know how they teach international relations in Calgary where Mr. Poilievre went to university but I have travelled around the world teaching seminars about communicating the need for medical research, specifically for Multiple Sclerosis. The International Federation of MS Societies always worked on the premise that solving one medical problem can often solve needs for other conditions. This broadly based scientific approach has paid off around the world.

But Mr. Poilievre would not allow it. When he says ‘Bring it home’ he literally means that he would cut back on our assistance and cooperation with other countries—particularly if he did not agree with how they were run or he did not like their leaders.

I have always felt in my world travels that we are all ambassadors for our countries. We promote democracy, not by preaching about it but by acting respectful of others’ ideas and customs. I cannot imagine our foreign relations under Mr. Poilievre.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Boxing Day Blues.

by Peter Lowry

Americans missed out on this one. The celebration on December 26, of Boxing Day that originated in England, never caught on in the American colonies. It is understandable, when you consider that it was a day for giving things to the poor and people who do the menial, under-paid chores for our society.

Canadians have Americanized the holiday by making it a time to buy things for themselves. It is just another day for shopping.

We Americanize a lot of things in this country. After all Canada’s population is strung out along the 5.5-thousand-mile border with its American neighbour. The only establishments guarding that unprotected border are outlet malls.

Canadians like to worry about the United States. America is our largest trading partner and we are never appreciated until the American administration needs something. There is always some American commodity organization complaining about our supposedly unfair trading practices because of government subsidies, in the guise of lower taxes or stumpage or our lower dollar. Sometimes we wonder if it is all worth all the trouble.

But our main concern in the coming year is the presidential election in the American Republic, next November. It is the stark fear that Donald Trump will find a way through the quagmire of charges and litigation to win the College of Electors and win a second four years in the Washington White House. As far as Canada is concerned it would be another reign of terror. It would be without the fumbling that marked the fiascos of the first four years. Trump would go for the jugular the second time around. He would be doing nothing more than assuaging his own ego that he can be, the dictator he wants to be. It might not mean the cancelling of the North American trade agreement but it would seem to be of the same effect.

Frankly, we should all be tired of these self-absorbed politicians of the extremist right, who are popping up around the world and have no compassion for us and our needs. There is much to be said for the kindly grandfather in the guise of a Franklin Roosevelt. We all need more people in politics of compassion and caring.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Hope for Hospitals.

by Peter Lowry

If there are any institutions hoping for better times in 2024, it is our hospitals. I believe the problems are happening across Canada but I can better relate to the shambles we are enduring in Ontario. We have a provincial government in this province making a conscious effort to destroy our Medicare.

Elected first in 2018, the conservative government was already cutting funding and disrupting the reasonably effective healthcare system, built over many years, when the pandemic became apparent.  The pandemic has been a struggle for all governments and the Ontario government got through the worst of it by fighting off the wage demands of large groups such as teachers and healthcare workers.

Given the light at the end of the tunnel over COVID, the province left the blame on the hospitals for the disruption and entered a period of encouraging privatization. This dismissal of Medicare was alibied by the private clinics being introduced as a solution to the horrendous backlog in minor to urgent surgeries. Instead of using empty hospital facilities, the surge was on for private clinics—paid for by the money labelled for Medicare. First-off the dime were the millionaire Ophthalmologists. These people are opening private clinics like mushrooms on your lawn. They will do the job for the OHIP payment but you really have to be resistant to their sales pitches for all their wonderful extras they will try to sell you.

But where were the staff coming from for all these private clinics? Doctors were readily available. It was the other medical staff that they enticed from the tight-fisted hospitals. Now the hospitals were unable to deliver. Hospital emergencies were short-staffed to the point of shutting down. When the hospital staffs were able to win more money from the Ontario government, the hospitals were hiring again.

But where did their new staff come from? The hospitals started raiding the family doctors’ offices with these pay hikes. Now the general practitioners were further alienated from the hospitals than they had been before. When the GPs figure out that their real enemy in all of this is the Ontario Medical Association, something smelly is going to hit the fan. All the Ontario government can count on is voter ignorance of what the hell is happening in their province.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Purpose of Politicians.

by Peter Lowry

An interesting discussion with a committed liberal the other day was the question of the purpose of our politicians. He insisted that the answer was as simple as: To spend money. I kept trying to add adjectives to that such as ‘judiciously,’ ‘wisely’ or ‘carefully.’ He wanted to keep it simple, he rejected the suggested adjectives.

I think he had a point. He was not presupposing how they would do the job nor was he holding them to be conservative, liberal or socially conscious of how they did the job. His answer was unswerving in that he considered it important that they spend the money we provide.

What he had not realized in the past was that conservatives hate to spend money and should not be hiding what they do not spend. Liberals have always been described as those ‘Tax and Spend liberals’ and are supposedly prepared to do just that. Socialists have a problem in that they differentiate between the types of spending and they tend to lavish funds on social matters, while tightening spending on matters such as policing, business or higher education.

I do not want to be accused of over-simplification, but if we keep lowering the voting age, we might have to eventually make it that simple.

But I found out that my friend had only recently read the auditor general of Ontario’s report that the Ford government has been socking away public funds that should have been used to improve social services and hospitals and in helping our municipalities build the housing that is so desperately needed.

And this was the conservative administration that ran on a slogan of “A Buck A Beer,” in 2018. They easily defeated a tight-assed liberal government that did not seem to know why it was in power.

You had to be paying close attention in the last years of the Stephen Harper regime in Ottawa to realize that those conservatives, with their majority were salting away money that they told us was for spent on the needs of Canadians. Justin Trudeau and the liberals came to power in 2015, as a breath of fresh air. Yet, even liberals sometimes forget why they are there.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Ford is No Academic.

by Peter Lowry

Earlier this month, Martin Regg Cohn of the Toronto Star tried to tell us that politicians do not care about universities. I thought at the time that I could add something to Regg Cohn’s observations.

The only real difference between Martin Regg Cohn and I is that he is a senior fellow of the sadly renamed Ryerson University and I was only appointed a fellow of McLaughlin College at York University back in the 1970s. All the ‘Fellow’ title really meant back then is you are never paid for anything.

But I enjoyed my role for the college and I think I helped. I particularly enjoyed the times when I would have a lecture hall turned over to me to discuss subjects such as business ethics with business and economics undergrads. It led to travelling around Ontario to many of our universities lecturing business students. Hobnobbing with all those academics, I found they were always willing to unload their financial concerns on the supposedly well-paid business executive.

But I ended up persona non grata at the business school at Western University in London, Ontario. I presented a paper I prepared for a province-wide gathering of business academics at the University of Toronto.  I had criticized Western’s use of the case study method in its business school, for teaching students to be competitive instead of encouraging ethical business practices. What amused me about it was when the Dean of Business at Western called the president of my company (who happened to be a Harvard MBA—Harvard is credited with creating the case study method) to complain about my remarks. The president told the Dean that he had read my presentation and agreed with every word of it.

But back to the cheap politicians in Ontario. Oddly enough there were no loud whimpers from the community colleges and universities in Ontario during the McGinty/Wynne era in government. There seems to be some coming through loud and clear about the Ford administration. If there was an attitude coming out of Queen’s Park, it is the premier’s dislike for his higher education experience. Ford is a loud and opinionated salesman. He dropped out of Humber College after just two months.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]

Bums on the Doorstep.

by Peter Lowry

One of the challenges of publishing a blog is the daily sweeping away of the myriad of organizations who send you story ideas to influence your output. The worst of this bunch are the public relations firms in the U.S. who want you to run stories about the awful Democrats. The worst of these is the one that uses the name Jerry McLothlin to send multiple story suggestions and people to interview every day. I have tried telling McLothlin et al that I am not really interested, but without success.

I suspect that they are having some limited success so they ignore your pleas to cease and desist. I like to think of them as bums on your doorstep that you have to sweep away each morning. If they really were bums, I would at least give them a toonie to get a morning coffee at Tims.

But these bums insult me. This is not just a stand-alone blog. I am also included in the collective known as Progressive Bloggers. You would think that would scare away these right-wing crazies.

One of those McLothlin missives landed in my in-basket today saying that President Biden’s Ignorance of “What is Happening at the Border Could Create a Major Crisis for the U.S. Before Christmas.” I am sure that one has the U.S. Secret Service puzzled. It reads as more of a threat unless the President caves into the demands of the Republicans. You would swear that Republicans should be more afraid of Putin and his merciless drive for more land to burn.

You wonder what is wrong with those MAGA supporters in the U.S. The silliest stuff comes from Texas.

It is not as though Canada does not have its own Looney-Toons politicians. I always get an up-tick in my U.S. readership when writing about that screw-ball premier we have in Alberta. I have always thought of Alberta as the most Americanized province in Canada. And if you ever want to meet a female version of Donald Trump, she is currently hanging out at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton. Just follow your nose north until your nose freezes off and you are in Edmonton.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

[email protected]