Category: New

What the hell are the media people thinking? One of the most critical questions to ask any candidate in this federal election is “What is your vaccine status? We have certainly had enough BS from Doug Ford in Ontario. We hardly need the same from the federal conservatives.

If there was one predominant need in Canada, it is for a feeling of normalcy. This is a time of year for making love in the moonlight. It is a time for barbeques and walks in the parks. If politicians want to run around making foolish promises, let them. They are part of the Canadian scenery.

But we have to get ourselves out of this pandemic. If that means we bridge someone’s supposedly God-given right to refuse to be vaccinated, so be it. Our survival on this poor planet depends on people being able to learn, to work, to play, to create a safe and secure world for our children and theirs.

Anyone who is healthy and able to be vaccinated should be. Nobody has the right to spread sickness and death. If they insist, let them go to Florida and die a gruesome death with the rest of the idiots down there. Those of us who got in line for our vaccines have earned the tight to a safer environment—no anti-vaxxers need interfere.

You would think that any candidate asking to participate in their party’s campaign would be asked the simple question: Have you been vaccinated for the coronavirus? And don’t you dare send an anti-vaxxer to my door to ask for my vote. That would be the height of stupidity.

And the human rights people can also get stuffed. I have a right to protect myself from any variants of covid. What do I have to do? Should I post a sign saying ‘Knock at your own risk?’ Or do I stipulate that anti-vaxxers will be shot on sight? I hope that it would be legal to shoot those who are challenging our right to a safe and secure society.

And I really don’t care if the conservatives are telling their anti-vaxxer candidates to get tested every day. Who is checking to make sure they are doing what they are told?

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The other day, our comment on conservative leader Erin O’Toole was that “he was a failure to launch.” He had a launch, of sorts, the following day. We watched aghast. It can only be concluded that his communications advisors, speech writers, policy advisors and image consultants were in serious conflict.

Canadians should not expect too much from the conservatives, but what we got by way of an introduction to the O’Toole campaign was embarrassing. We have not seen anything so lame since 2000 and Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day arrived for his first news conference on a jet ski.

Start with the muscle-beach policy book cover. What idiot suggested that a dowdy, middle-aged leader such as O’Toole should try to pose like a latter-day Charles Atlas? Not even Adobe Photoshop can rescue that picture. And what fool suggested the crossed-arms pose? The crossed arms is an angry and aggressive pose and no politician can afford that kind of exposure when it is particularly disliked by women.

But the copywriter who wrote “The man with the plan” must have been impressed with the failed American sitcom on CBS. And the, obviously male, experts who dictated that plan to replace the liberal daycare program with tax benefits should have realized that they were helping the rich, not the poor. They fail to understand what the liberals seem to comprehend. The provinces have to start by creating the needed daycare spaces.

And if O’Toole is going to use that dark, cold and dreary set for his entire campaign, the conservatives should leave him in it, lock the door and consider it his mausoleum.

The contrast between the Trudeau family outing that day and the stand-alone pitch of the conservative leader was disquieting. Whatever did the conservative brain-trust have in mind? O’Toole would have done better to use the family kitchen for a set. It might have humanized the poor man.

Even the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh, in Montreal at the time, realized that he needed some people on the set that day to make it look like he was in Canada. Poor O’Toole could be coming to us from the moon.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The important thing to remember is that polls are a picture from yesterday. They cannot forecast the future. And we live in volatile, rapidly changing times. We are struggling to leave a pandemic behind us. We are wary of what global warming has in store for us. We are looking for leadership in the difficult future we are facing.

This is by way of introducing the Toronto Star’s new election tool. They are going to have a new computer model analyzing pollsters’ products to tell us about the 2021 election. The editors think they are “decoding the signal” or some other catchy phrase like that.

What it appears they are doing is inputting all the various polls into a computer program that applies a weighting scale to the various polling techniques and then aggregates them into a seat count. Which is very similar to what Éric Grenier of the CBC does in his Poll Tracker.

I remember years ago, before the advent of personal computers, filling page after page of computations trying to balance polling results with known Statistics Canada demographics. Overall, I think we did a fair job.

What really intrigues me about the Toronto Star’s approach is the trust the newspaper is putting in political scientists. These people are using a theory of probability, known as a Bayesian model, to correct perceived bias in the polling results of the various firms. The obvious problem with this is when the polling firm does its own corrections. How would the second firm know that the poll has already been corrected? That would tend to over-correct.

What no pollster has been able to correct is the tendency of some people to lie to pollsters. For example, I do not always lie. If I recognize the firm doing the polling, I might decide to tell the truth for a change. Mind you, I hate the automated calls and I always tell them something different.

But it all comes down to the age-old need for political parties to get out their vote. No computer model can accurately count the lethargic. With the voting lists distributed to each political party via computer, you can hardly escape the attention of the parties to whom you made promises. If you get more than two offers of a ride to the polling station, you know they have been paying attention.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

It sometimes happens that the Toronto Star gets something right. On August 13, the largest newspaper in Canada used its front page for an editorial asking: ‘Show us leadership.’ If there was one word that asks for Canada’s greatest need in this time, it is ‘Leadership.’ The provinces and our federal government are desperate for leadership.

The federal election on September 20 is hardly the answer. It reminds you so much of Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel: “Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land.”

To be fair, I think this election will do much to clear the air and underline the need for new leadership. Justin Trudeau is hardly the answer. He does not even understand the leadership of his father. Sometimes his father could be caustic and insulting to Canadians but, in balance, his leadership was critical to his times. He understood rights and freedoms. He understood the needs of the individual. He laughed at the collectives, and frustrated the mean and selfish. He often used intellect when humanitarianism was needed.

We have had no leadership since. We had the politics of cant over need. Slogans instead of policy.

It is not that Trudeau the Younger does not have his moments. His popping out of Rideau Cottage to discuss Covid-19 was a fortuitous calmer of the pandemic. His feminism had poor follow-through, his environmentalism was conflicted, his appointments elitist and some of his promises ill-considered. He got a C-plus on his report card.

But failure is not in the cards. Nobody has done better.

Erin O’Toole of the conservatives has been ‘a failure to launch’ on Canada’s political scene. He does not seem to know what to say and when to say it.

And you can hardly count on the pockets of Sikhs in British Columbia and Ontario to rescue Jagmeet Singh of the new democrats from oblivion. The Greens have ruled themselves out and the Bloc are just troublemakers.

The most likely scenario is to suffer Justin Trudeau’s minority for a couple more years and let all three of the major parties search their souls for some leadership. Who knows what the tides of time will bring?

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

That old adage about never discussing religion or politics is not observed in my home. It is my belief, in our increasingly secular society, that religion and politics are two subjects of special concern. Both are at a junction. They interact with each other and both clerics and politicians use each other’s tools to proselytize. In some ways they are symbiotic. They feed off of each other. Both use each other despite their denials. Both are in troubled times.

Religion can be intrusive in our daily lives. In Canada we see the Hassidic with his dreadlocks, the Sikh with turban and beard of the five Ks of the tenth guru, the Bedouin with her hijab, the horse and buggy of the Amish, each submitting to the rigours of the past with little recompense for change, fashion or technology. They are all part of the pageantry that is Canada.

Politics plays lip service to religion and the religious return the hypocrisy. Religion is in sharp decline while politics is increasingly in disrepute. We seem to find more and more fault with leaders of morality and of state. Frankly, they have failed us for too long. Their scripts of religion have become hollow and faith a fantasy. Why can the religion of Muhammed promise houri to the man of faith while Christians offer nothing but to sit at the right hand of the son of God? Frankly, the fiction of Christian purgatory sounds more inviting.

But it is like the hollow promises of desperate politicians. It is not the promises they keep that matter as much as their corrupt philosophies. Would you really sit still for a politician who promised you laissez-faire administration where there would be no regulations of business and no checking of what few rules are left? Instead, this politician tells you that his opponent is a thief and he is going to establish law and order. Have you ever asked an NDP what they would really do if they formed a government? Or asked a liberal what liberalism stands for?

I have always been fascinated with the rationale that people will attach to their religious beliefs or political support. You should ask people serious questions about this. It might open your eyes to what you might believe and help support.

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Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]