Category: New

How soon we forget our roots.  Outgoing Liberal Party President Alf Apps is asking the grass roots of the Liberal Party to approve a $2.5 million call centre in Ottawa.  Liberals will get to vote on this foolishness at their biennial conference in mid January.  It shows just how far from a reformer, Alf  has travelled since the 1980s.

When we first met back then, Alf was the angry young man, tackling the ‘non-elected’ managers of Liberal politics.  His notoriety assured, he slipped into the same conservative mould as what he was complaining about.  Alf  became ‘they.’

Alf now wants the Liberals to have Conservative Party style phone banks.  He wants to be just like them.  He wants a centrally controlled party to make the decisions, commit the funds and run the country.  And he is asking the people, whom he does not trust to do the job, to approve his plan.  He is like a dictator saying vote for me or else!

The party gathering should tell Alf to ‘stuff it.’

What Alf does not seem to understand is that the Liberal Party has—or can create—a call centre in every electoral district across Canada.  It has had them before and they work better than the call centres working currently trying to get the Liberals a million bucks for Christmas.  Liberals respond best when it is someone they know who is calling and is identified with that area of the country.

Does Alf want a call centre that, when it has nothing better to do, makes spurious calls to a riding telling people their MP is resigning? Does he think that is worthwhile?

Alf is concerned that the Conservatives have raised almost three times as much as the Liberals in the past year.  The one thing for sure is that Alf seems to have skipped his classes on basic marketing.  (Sorry, Alf is a lawyer.  They usually know nothing about marketing.)  The Conservatives had something to sell.

The Liberals are selling nothing but a big red tent that anybody who does not want to be identified as right or left can get under.  They have to get rid of the tent, move clearly to the left and stand for something.  That is what this biennial conference has to achieve.  At least the people Alf complained about in the 1980s were achievers!

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

There is a very elaborate and cautious process involved here and nobody rushes these things.  The Roman Church does not undertake the creation of a saint casually or in any way spuriously.  Saints are sacrosanct.  The process can take hundreds of years.  That is why the beatification of St. Stephen II will not be an overnight sensation.  It took a long time for St. Stephen I, the first King of Hungary, who brought Christianity to the Hungarians, to be recognized as a saint.  You have to figure it will take a lot longer for Canadians to really appreciate St. Stephen II, who brought the blessings of Western Conservatism to the benighted of Canada.

It all started with the musings of Rex Murphy of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation fame.  Speaking on the National news program a while ago, Mr. Murphy revealed that it might not be Stephen Harper who is the extremist on political matters.  Mr. Murphy posited that it could be Mr. Harper’s detractors who are the extremists in these circumstances.  Maybe it is Mr. Harper who is getting a bum rap.

It was because of this revelation from on high—and a most unlikely source—that the Roman Church sprang into action.  In a country such as Canada it is a serious problem to have such a paucity of saints.  In Italy, you have a saint for almost every 678 people while 33 million Canadians have to share a very small number who have made it into the charmed circle.

And while the prospective saint, Stephen Harper has not particularly proselytized Catholicism to Canadians, he has certainly done a fine job in scaring hell out of the godless naysayers, communists, gays, environmentalists, fallen women, liberals and other left-wingers in Canadian society.

And nobody appreciates this more than the Roman Church—the bastion of regression in Canada and around the world.  The public relations people have been telling the church leaders for years that they need more positive role models.  It is not enough to have Jesus on side; he is from too far in the past.  Who today wants to listen to a guy in a long flowing dress.  You need role models that people can relate to in modern times.

You need more Stephen Harper’s on side.  Make him a saint.  He will be dead when you do.  He can hardly object.  You could make his saint’s day around July 1 to stir a little patriotism.  This guy has potential.  So what if he is not Roman Catholic?

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

In the next federal election, there are going to be 30 more seats in Canada’s House of Commons.  Despite half of those seats being in Ontario, it will still not be fair.  The fact is that there is no way to have a fair distribution of seats unless there is a Constitutional Assembly that can address the basics of how we want this country to be governed.

As things stand, having 30 more Members of Parliament is a meaningless expense wasted on meaningless people.  Mr. Harper will make sure that the 30 new candidates for his party are servile toadies who will do what he and his party managers tell them.

It used to be that the party leader’s signature on a candidate’s information entitled the candidate to public funding based on the last vote.  Mr. Harper has put an end to that funding. It was fair and the last thing Mr. Harper wants to be to the Opposition is fair.  It is not in his vocabulary.

All that is left of the legislation, controlling who can be a candidate for any party, is the need for the party leader’s signature.  This denies the electoral district associations the right to choose their candidates.  It creates centrally controlled federal political parties.  It denies the basic democracy that used to ensure that all regions and constituencies across Canada were represented and had a voice in the governing of our country.  It has created a process that is destroying the political parties.

It has reached a point that people do not care that they are voting for an idiot—as long as the idiot wears the right color tie.  They would be better to vote by color, blue for the Conservatives, red for the Liberals, orange for the NDP, green for the Green, etc.  After all, that is what they do in countries where most of the voters are illiterate!  Act illiterate and you will be treated that way.

But Mr. Harper likes it that way.  He can fly around the world as a potentate in his military A300 Airbus and pontificate on his economic ideas.  He can leave his lackeys to lie to and confuse the voters.  He can turn the House of Commons into a sheep pen where political parties can trot out their votes as needed.  It is no longer a civil place.  It is no longer a polite place.  It is certainly no place to debate the needs of our people.  And we want to send another 30 people into that place?

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is always ready to spring to the defence of Alberta’s oil industry.  He thinks our tar sands product is getting a particularly unfair rap.  Just the other day he was complaining that some American banana company does not want to use any gas or diesel fuel made from Canada’s oil.  Mr. Harper claimed that our heavy oil pollutes just as much as any other heavy oil.

Do you see how those terrible tar sands are being transitioned?  It all started when people found out how much pollution got into the atmosphere when you extracted oil from the Alberta tar sands. The prevailing westerly winds from Northern Alberta are carrying hundreds of tonnes of pollutants across the rest of Canada.  Alberta gets billions of barrels of oil and billions of barrels of polluted water while the rest of us get the carcinogens.  To solve the problem, some smart oil company guy said:  Don’t call it tar sands, call it oil sands.

The only problem is that whether you call it tar or oil, it is still really gunky, heavy stuff that pours like molasses and is full of sulphur.  The oil industry calls that heavy oil.  It is nowhere near as desirable as the West Texas Light Sweet that always made the best (and the least expensive) gasoline for American-built automobiles.

But Canada and Mr. Harper are stuck with the gunk!  What can we possibly do with one of the largest oil reserves in the world?  It is rated at about 175 billion barrels and at oil prices around $100 per barrel, there are more than a few people willing to dig it up.  But now that he has transitioned the tar sands to heavy oil, Mr. Harper thinks he has solved the problems.  He has thrown the gauntlet to the industry to cut the pollution to acceptable(?) levels.

At the same time, he and his friends in the oil industry are going to ‘work hard to get the real information out there.’ He is not going to allow any more misinformation to be getting in the way of maximizing the profits from Alberta’s newly named ‘heavy oil industry.’  The problem for the environmentalists among us is that our economy has to have that oil to survive.  We can hardly back up to the days of the horse and buggy.

No doubt, sometime, maybe 50 years from now, the world will have developed technologies to free us from oil dependency.  In the meantime, we should make sure that polluters pay to clean up their own messes.  And maybe the banana company can explain how they can tell if the gas at the pump came from Saudi Arabia or from Canada.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

The copyright on the big lie theory expired centuries ago.  The ancient military theorist Sun Tzu explained misinformation and its value in his tome “The Art of War.”  There is little new in the way Canada’s Conservatives use lies for political advantage.  What is new is how stupid Canadians are who let them get away with it.

Simple misinformation is one thing.  That is putting a slightly different spin on things to make them more acceptable to the public.  These are not prevarications as much as sugar coatings to get the gullible among us to swallow something more noxious.  For example, when Defence Minister Peter MacKay wanted to use a Search and Rescue helicopter to leave a fishing camp, somebody suggested he represent it as an overdue training exercise.  It could have worked if the lie had not been blown by both military underlings and his ‘friend,’ the Prime Minister.

What is really stupid is to let a blown piece of misinformation become a cause cèlébre.  MacKay would have been far smarter to ‘fess up and play the incident for laughs.

But nobody was laughing in the Town of Mont Royal where the Conservatives were paying a telephone bank to tell people that their Member of Parliament was resigning.  That was rather insensitive when you consider that it is an electoral district with more Jewish voters than elsewhere in the Province.  For the Conservatives to try to laugh that off as a prank was particularly dumb.

That seems to be the problem with many Conservatives.  You can hardly be dumb as a stump and expect your lies to be effective.  Take Environment Minister Peter Kent in the House of Commons the other day when he explained his version of the Kyoto Accord decision.  After not allowing any opposition politicians access to the South Africa conference, he should not criticize them for not being there.  This annoyed them.

Stupid lies seem to abound in Stephen Harper’s Ottawa.  The one we have the least time for is the one that says the long gun registry does not work.  If it does not work, why are police chief’s across Canada saying it does work?

That is the same as the Canada Wheat Board.  It no longer belongs to the Canadian Government and is owned and run by Canadian farmers.  And Mr. Harper says he has been asked by the farmers to shut it down.  It seems to us that the ‘farmers’ Mr. Harper is referring to have never run a combine.  This is not a farmer-friendly decision.

It seems we have barely scratched the surface of the lies Mr. Harper is capable of during a majority government.  The next few years will not be fun.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

Tempers flared in Ottawa yesterday.  The usually unruly question period in the House of Commons got beyond the Commons Speaker’s limited control.  Unparliamentary language was heard and recorded.  Justin Trudeau MP was heard calling Conservative Environment Minister Peter Kent “A piece of shit.”  While not wishing to disagree with the young Trudeau, one appreciates that he was immediately contrite about such a remark.  The only thought that comes to mind is wondering just how spontaneous the shouted remark might have been.

When Justin’s father was Prime Minister, he was also once accused of directing a crudity at another erstwhile Conservative of the day.  In keeping with the times, Pierre Trudeau knew to deny everything and to introduce the term “fuddle-duddle” to Canadians.  Everyone knew that he had mouthed a very basic message to “fuck off” to the MP who was annoying him but the honour of the House was upheld by the denial.

But there is no honour in today’s House of Commons.  There is even less honour in the now Conservative-dominated Senate of Canada. Canada’s Parliament is run by one man.  Prime Minister Harper makes the rules and his lackey’s try to enforce them.  It is not just that the House must endure the fabrications of Defence Minister MacKay and the chicanery of Treasury Board President Clement but to have Environment Minister Kent so lamely trying to stonewall questions from the Opposition could try the patience of saints.  Somebody will have to tell Harper: ‘Kent can’t do it.’

When Pierre Trudeau once famously noted that Conservative MPs are nobodies when 50 yards from Parliament Hill, he had obviously not met the current crop of nobodies.  He would have used stronger language if he had to deal with these nebishes.

To young Trudeau, the challenge today is to cash in on his famous father while building his own strengths and awareness among Canadians.  He has to be his own man if he wants to carry on the dynasty.  He made the point clearly when he so quickly apologized for his unparliamentary language.  He knew that today, he was best to acknowledge what he said and he was not all that contrite.

What Justin really did was to steal the headlines from the NDP Opposition in the Commons and win the issue of the day.  Well played sir!

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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

With apologies to songwriter and singer, Roy Orbison.

You do not always feel loved when being honest in writing about liberalism and the Liberal Party in Canada.  There are many liberals who enjoy the insights but probably just as many who feel challenged.  What we know for sure is that the right wing of the Liberal Party does not like being challenged.  They do not even like being called Whigs.

And what the Whigs do not like to admit these days is that there is a very strong and growing segment of the party demanding reform.  If you are ever going to really reform the Liberal Party, now is the time.  It is a time of a low ebb of Members in the House of Commons.  It is a time when struggling under an interim leader—one who knows the meaning of the word ‘interim.’  It is a time when it is tough to raise funds because nobody knows where we are going to go with the money.

But the old cliché is that when times are tough, you tough it out.  There is a very real concern today that almost a third of the Liberal Party’s electoral district associations are moribund.  They are moribund because they have no purpose.  They can be resuscitated tomorrow.  They just have to be given some control and purpose and respect.  They have to be responsible for choosing their Liberal candidates.  They have to be responsible for raising the funds needed for election time.  They must be responsible for the direction of the Liberal Party.  They need to be party to choosing the party’s leader—who will be responsible to them!

Is that too much to ask?

Liberals across Canada are also articulating those demands.  Some might not like the fact that Babel-on-the-Bay makes the demands public.  It is the only way you can reach out to the millions of Canadians who feel as we do.  And that number is in the millions.  Never underestimate the desire of Canadians to be fair.  Never deny their honesty.  This is not a country that wants to throw alms to the impoverished from gated communities.  This is a country where we all wish to live together in harmony.

The Liberal Party of Canada meets in conclave starting January 13 in Ottawa.  The slogan for the conference should be drawn from a gathering in Peterborough in 1967.  It attracted some backbenchers from Ottawa—one of them was a new MP, Pierre Trudeau—and some party workers and the meeting slogan was “Get off your ass.”  Our late Prime Minister used to laugh about things that happened at that meeting, but he always remembered that simple slogan.

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Copyright 2011 © Peter Lowry

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