Category: New

Look Like a Leader.

by Peter Lowry

Ontario liberal leader Steven Del Duca made an admirable effort. The liberal leader’s only problem was that to be elected leader of a major political party, you have to look like a leader. And you have to rev up the troops. Modesty is very nice, after you win.

But Del Duca came out a loser. He should have been in the legislature before the general election. You do not campaign from a utility vehicle. You wear a suit and tie. (You can take off the tie north of Highway 7.) You have advance people to ensure the crowds and enthusiasm. A good campaign has punch. A winning campaign builds momentum.

Sitting on the sidelines here in Barrie, Ontario was painful. I had placed my bets on our local mayor beating a carpetbagger from Severn. No such luck. Oh well, our former mayor, and now former candidate, did not ask for my help.

It never was a feel-good campaign. The vote seemed to depend on those angry enough to harm themselves. Self-destruction was the order of the do-nothing campaign. It was obvious that it was a campaign where few bothered to vote. The early figures of only 43.5 per cent of voters going to the polls is shocking.

For an election as to whether we would keep Doug Ford as premier or turf him out, less than 25 per cent of voters made the decision.

The road ahead for Ontario is a rocky road. It will be a time when developers and ministerial zoning orders (MZO) will rule. Build where you want. Farmland will give way to pavement. Greenbelts and wetlands will disappear. Prices will be for excessive profits. The poor of Ontario will stay poor. The rich will get richer. Healthcare will suffer. The aged will be ignored. We will not be proud of this province we call home.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Campaigns Gone By.

by Peter Lowry

This has been both the shortest and seemingly the longest campaign in Ontario history. I felt uninvolved. I was left out. The days of bounding up steps to knock on doors are behind me. The only job offered to me was to do phone calls. I was not interested. In this age when all the creativity seems to go to the Internet media, I could have livened up the print media.

What I saw in print from candidates, in mine and other ridings, was stuff that did not pass Go and went directly to the recycle container. What really surprised me was not much was said in this literature about the candidates. You would think if the party is at all pleased with its candidate, they would tell us why. All we want to know is what this person has done to make them worthy of representing us in the Ontario legislature?

Are all of these people just drones who will run, jump and vote as they are told? You would think the conservative in my riding was modest as the author of Bill 161. That was the act of the Legislature designed to help prevent class-action law suits against long-term care facilities that lost too many of their residents to COVID-19 because of negligence and inadequate care.

(You do know, do you not, that former conservative premier Mike Harris makes over $200,000 per year as chairman of Chartwell—one of the larger for-profit long-term care home providers.)

The paucity today of good political literature is having its effect. We are getting a poorer quality of candidates. Many are appointed as opposed to chosen by the riding. Their literature for the riding is nothing but a series of slogans.

We used to care.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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A Chance to Choose.

by Peter Lowry

We will have a chance to see tomorrow how many of our fellow Ontario voters got to the polls in this provincial election. I might be surprised if more than six out of ten bothered.  It has not been a campaign that generated any excitement.

It was obvious in the ten days of advance polls that the amount of interest in the campaign was limited. If we had reduced the advance polls to two days, there might have been a few short line-ups. The ten days was a waste of money. And the only politicians to benefit from it were incumbents. It freed up election-day workers for their campaigns. The workers could concentrate on getting out the vote on the final election day.

I must admit that I have never really liked the election day effort. I don’t like feeling like a nag. I have heard many hundreds of reasons why people did not make it to mark their ballot. I was always happy to have some other duties for that day. Most often, I would opt for getting the counting of the vote properly organized and displayed at the after-the-vote party.

I think what annoyed me the most on election day were the radio people encouraging people to get out and vote—no matter how they intended to vote. I always thought they were encouraging stupid people to go do something stupid. It has always struck me that we should make voters prove they have seriously thought about it, before they are allowed to vote.

Not everyone agrees with me. A chap I once knew gave a Kiwanis Club speech about stupid people being just as entitled to stupid representation. He was actually alibiing the stupid people who elect stupid politicians. I think, it is likely, this election has proved him right once again.

I have often made the point that good leadership can help alleviate the problems of having stupid politicians on the back benches. Mind you, this current Ontario campaign has not been noted for the genius of our party leaders. Oh well, another four years and who knows?

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Done Like Dinner.

by Peter Lowry

It would seem that Ontario’s conservative leader Doug Ford has never missed a dinner. He is the proverbial ‘fat cat.’ He is a salesman without scruples. He uses people. He tells them what he thinks they want to hear. He is not even a conservative. It would strain his brain to explain what conservatism stands for.

And the election period is over tomorrow. It is the farce that played in Ontario this spring. It was a campaign of many promises and little progress. It was a campaign for the future and little hope.  The current election campaign in Ontario should go down as the worst campaign in the province’s history. It has been a campaign of nickel-and-dime offers and comes down to a highway that is not needed.

It was an election that avoided the elephant in the intensive care units. It avoided the casual destruction by the conservatives of Ontario’s Medicare system. Somehow, we find that COVID-19 is blamed for the cuts the conservatives made in our hospital funding. Nurses across Ontario have been betrayed. And yet, some of us are actually convinced that the pandemic is over. And people are still dying of COVID every day.

And does anyone care that our children have lost most of two years of schooling because of erratic and badly planned lockdowns. Did anyone in government care about our teachers? Does the minister of education know that computer-learning alone fails the needs of our children?

Other than our hard-pressed medical people, there are no heroes of the pandemic, only survivors.

The best kept secret of this campaign was that the billions Doug Ford wants to spend on an unnecessary highway is needed to electrify Ontario’s commuter trains—making the system faster and more efficient. And some highways will always be needed to move the bounty of our farmlands, the goods and products of our labour and people into the remote corners of our vast province. 

And what is it that Doug Ford and the conservatives are promising seniors? In an era of hyper-inflation, the people at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder and the seniors on fixed incomes are being hurt the worst. Neither Ontario’s poor nor seniors are Ford and the conservative’s concern.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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They Lie, You Know.

by Peter Lowry

Leaked memos, a quiet word with someone ‘in the know.’ You hear a lot of tall tales from politicians as they come to the end of their campaign. It is arrogance, desperation and it is flat out lies. Voters have read and heard so many claims and promises that are so unlikely to be true or kept.

You keep expecting Doug Ford to add the words “Have I ever lied to you before?” You know he has. The man lies by habit. He was taught the secrets of campaigning by his late brother Rob Ford. Promise anything and worry about the alibi for not delivering later.

And there is that stupid slogan: Get it done. Doug Ford is your classic second-storey man. The only difference is, he just holds the ladder for the real thieves.

You need to remember that Ford got his start in politics in Toronto city hall. That means his besties are the developers. There seems to be a very satisfying relationship in Toronto between the right-wing councillors and the developers. They are often joined at the hip.

When his people resurrected highway 413, that the liberals had turned down, Ford found the perfect present for his developer friends.

And speaking of the ridiculous, the new democrats that Andrea Horwath visits with throughout the campaign, introduce her as the next premier of Ontario. Now there is a stretch for you. Why she wastes time making promises she will never have to deliver, is just one of those mysteries in life.

Steven Del Duca of the liberals is much more modest. He has much to be modest about. The van he is travelling around the province in is an embarrassment. At least Ford and Horwath can look out a window once in a while to see if they are still in Kansas. Del Duca also seems to have forgotten to have an advance team. Maybe he just wants to surprise the liberals he visits.

In the final days of this campaign, Doug Ford was so rude as to campaign in Steven Del Duca’s riding. That is an insult to a struggling opponent. And as for Andrea Horwath, she told a reporter the other day that our health-care system is on its knees and hemorrhaging. She said this is a “hope election—not that people have hope, but that they are losing hope and need to know that they can have hope again.”  Let’s hope it’s not four years from now.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Run-off Elections are Best.

by Peter Lowry

An acquaintance was berating me the other day for preferring first-past-the-post voting. The truth is though that I would really prefer run-off elections in every electoral district where needed. It would be simple and cost less than it does now if people learn to trust computer voting.

In any electoral district where a candidate has more than 50 per cent of the votes cast, you have a winner. In ridings where no candidate achieves 50 per cent, you have a run-off election a week later between the top two vote getters.

The first thing you have achieved is a politician is elected who represents the majority vote from your electoral district. They represent you—not just their party. They answer to you when the next election is called.

And I cannot emphasize enough the value of having someone representing you and your community in parliament or the legislature. It is the tension created by the possible conflict between the wants of the voters and the wants of the party. For too long now we have been witnessing the actions of parties that put political dogma ahead of their concern for the citizens.

All these various types of proportional representation are based on putting people into power who are not elected. These people sit in judgement of us without our agreement. They answer only to the leader of their party. I think people are damn fools if they want to give party leaders that much power.

There is a different problem with preferential voting. When there are just two or three candidates, you often find there is little difference from first-past-the-post voting. When there are many candidates, you reach a point where people have no knowledge of some of the candidates and yet think they have to rate them as to preference. What, in effect, happens is that the voting drills down to what might be the least objectionable candidate—without really knowing much about the individual.

It should be noted that a properly managed string of hundreds of secure computers would be needed for a national Internet vote. There are more than just a few ways of encrypting the network to ensure that any hackers are wasting their time.

And we can also count on reducing the costs by limiting voting to our phones and computers, as well as at libraries and government offices.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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America Bleeds.

by Peter Lowry

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” Watching that hard-luck hypocrite, the governor of Texas blathering about the events in Uvalde, Texas, I thought of William Shakespeare’s Henry V. The only difference is that Shakespeare understood honour. Honour is what the State of Texas lacks.

And why must American states keep killing their children to prove their fealty to the gun nuts? Must the enemies that they imagine take precedence over their real enemies? And must American President Joe Biden only ask: “Why”?

In a nation reputed to have more guns than citizens, the National Rifle Association (NRA) rules. Is a second civil war in the offing to decide the issue?

And, yes, you can take guns away from the crazies. How difficult can it be when your enemy champions its leader, the liar Donald Trump? Does the liar lead his troops to battle? Or will the followers of Trump continue to be but a rump, sacrificing their innocent children to the gods of war?

Is Biden afraid of angering these fools? Is he but an old rooster scratching and seeking seeds of approval from the hen house? Is Congress so trapped in left and right ideology that no compromise or compassion is possible. Can they not agree, at least, to saving the children?

And cannot Americans live in harmony, with peace between the shades of black and white, white and brown, brown and yellow, yellow and red?

And will the racists continue to rampage? If you kill your brother, it is fratricide, if you kill your mother, it is matricide. And do you know what they call people who kill children? The word is ‘coward.’ Children must be the only ones who don’t shoot back.

But any place where people gather is vulnerable. When they gather in church, synagogue or temple. Who takes a gun there? Or how about going grocery shopping? That is even dangerous in Buffalo, New York. Is no one safe from this butchery?

And one final comment: That despicable governor of Texas can aid and abet murderers with the easiest gun laws in America. America has only the court of public opinion to try that fool.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

This Campaign Sucks.

by Peter Lowry

The current election campaign in Ontario should go down as the worst campaign in the province’s history. I told liberal leader Steven Del Duca that a 15-day campaign was not to his advantage. At first, he did not understand what I was saying, and then, if he did understand, he ignored me.

I had never heard of an election wherein all voters could casually cast their ballots just 15 days after the election is called. And who do you think benefits from such a scenario? If you are a blowhard and an unreliable schmuck like Doug Ford, the less time people have to think the better.

But who is the bigger fool than the guy who has stayed out of the legislature in his first two years of being party leader? Does Del Duca think he is going to be better known in just 15 days? The truth is that people could actually go to the riding returning office and vote on the day after the writ but few take advantage of that. They usually just take away a mail-in ballot and hope it arrives on time.  

The wife and I had a very pleasant visit to the polls on Queen Victoria’s holiday. We chatted for a while with the staff. Business was slow. The poll clerks enjoyed having visitors. And, quite honestly, I don’t know what to make of the slowness of the voting. Are people disinterested in the election or are they too fixed in the habit of voting on the official voting day?

But what really concerns me are the biases and the inadequacies of our Ontario news media. And there is no point in complaining to the CRTC about the biased broadcast media. I was told by the CRTC minions that they only pay attention if all political comment during the campaign by that licensed outlet can be shown to be biased.

Lately I have been more concerned about the Toronto Star and all its little grocery-flyer deliverers around the province. I have had the feeling for some time now that the Star has dispensed with experienced news editors. The new owners and their lawyer seem to think a newspaper should be full of long-winded opinion pieces.

By way of example, on Tuesday this week, there was one news item and two opinion pieces on page one, with lengthy carries in the inner pages of the section. One of the opinions pieces was by the Star’s Martin Regg Cohn. Regg Cohn’s opinion piece on Doug Ford read more like hero worship than a fair discussion of Ford, the quality of his leadership and his campaign tactics.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Legault’s Gestapo.

by Peter Lowry

History has a slower pace in Canada’s Quebec Province. Old wounds are often rubbed raw as the shibboleths of long ago, such as Duplessis’ Padlock Law, are repeatedly turned against minorities. And the hounds of l’office Québécois de la langue française are to be loosed on business large and small under an oppressive Bill 96.

In Bill 96, Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is brushed aside with the use of the ‘Not Withstanding’ clause. If the National Assembly did not know that their proposed law was contrary to the rights and freedoms of Canadians, why else would they use the clause?

Legault’s government in Quebec has its own Gestapo ready pounce on the unwary firm that defies the purity of the French language. Like the “Racial Purity Act” of Germany of 1933, the law in Quebec has its language police who will not only determine who speaks French, and what is correct French and what is the forbidden anglicised French.

You can assume that you no longer can say “Le weekend.” And I guess, “Le hot-dog” is verboten. It is ignored that these terms are common in Parisian French. The Quebec version of French must be locked somewhere in the last 300 years. And, for gosh sake, don’t label your small store in Quebec as “The Olde Shoppe.” Let the tourists figure it out for themselves.

The most invasive part of Bill 96 is the provision of search and seizure, without cause or warrant, by these language police. You can bet a lot of long-standing piques are being satisfied as Bill 96 becomes law in Quebec.

It is not as though the Legault government has not been advised of the draconian nature of the bill. They know that the anglophones and allophones are angry and the politicians are laughing. They know that they will win nothing where the anglophones and allophones reside. They win without those seats. They just want their traditional voters to hang with them. That is all they need.

But they also annoy the rest of us. Canada is a country that wants to be an example to the world of racial and language harmony. People seeking sanctuary, or seeking peace or acceptance can find it here in Canada. Maybe not in Legault’s Quebec. Don’t dare be different there.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Kenney’s Comeuppance.

by Peter Lowry

Jason Kenney is leaving the building. He is a political has been. I first noticed him in 2007 when he was a parliamentary secretary to prime minister Stephen Harper. Harper promoted him to secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity and then I paid attention.

What I soon realized was that he had found a much easier way to promote political involvement with ethnic groups than I had faced 30 years earlier. I had often thought you could do much more with money, position and staff.

While I made fun of Kenney—referring to him as one of the Bobbsey Twins—you had to admit that two fat and forty bachelors such as John Baird and Jason Kenney in a conservative cabinet—were something of an anomaly. Not that I gave a damn about their sexual orientation but it did not take long when Kenney went back to Alberta that there were complaints about him being a misogynist.

What concerned me most in the Harper years, was that Kenney was digging hard at a lot of votes that traditionally went to the liberals. I hardly wanted to see Harper in power any longer.

Kenney also fell into the category of politician I have come to despise. He is a career politician. I tend to have more respect for the person who builds a successful career in the private sector before turning their attention to politics.

All I knew when Harper was finally defeated in 2015 was that Kenney had lots of options. When he got the ten-gallon Stetson, the blue pick-up and the fat-boy jeans, I knew there was trouble in the offing for Alberta. I knew for sure that eventually, he would unite the right in Alberta against him.

And I knew Alberta was not the Calgary he knew. There is even a difference between the oil barons of Calgary and Edmonton. And there is a good reason why the University of Alberta in Edmonton is more respected than the University of Calgary. Calgary is the most Americanized city in Canada and the easterners who came west to work the oil and pipelines were another breed entirely. Kenney was defeated by a pandemic he did not understand and people, he came to dislike.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]