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Ford’s 15-Day Election.

by Peter Lowry

It’s election time in Ontario and it is the shortest election in the province’s history. It will be just 15 days after the election is called that the voting starts. Despite the election act that calls for 28 days of dueling promises, Mr. Ford has convinced Ontario’s chief election officer to have 10 days of voting in addition to the final voting and counting day on June 2.

These additional days of voting used to be called advance polls. They were for those going on vacation or for some other reason were to going to be unable to vote on election day. Now they are just additional days on which you can vote.

But what is a convenience for the voters is a problem for political parties. It limits their canvassing days. Much of the effort the party workers put into knocking on doors and getting out literature now has to be redirected much earlier than before to getting out the vote. There are now 11 days out of 28, legally allowed for the election, that have to be devoted to helping voters to get to the polls. (There are also four days between the ten days of voting and the final voting day on June 2.)

The question you might ask is who benefits from fewer days for the election? Obviously, it will be the conservatives under Doug Ford who will benefit. Any wannabe autocrat will tell you that the fewer days that their opponents have to campaign against them, the better. There is also the fact that the conservatives have more financing and workers than the other parties.

And if you had been wondering why premier Ford has been going all over the province, at our expense, making announcements of public money for this project or that project, was because of the abbreviated election that was coming.  Ford even dishonoured his own commitment to having the provincial budget by the end of March each year to the week before the election so that he could promise more nickels and dimes to lure unsuspecting voters.

And don’t you love the way Mr. Ford keeps the taxes down. He just creates a lot more debt for us.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Needed and the Needy.

by Peter Lowry

A friend sent me an ad for a Brit t-shirt company known for their political opinions that certainly sums up the Ford administration in Ontario. They cost almost as much to ship to Canada as the pence they cost so I will just tell you what one of the T-shirts said about the motto of the Brit conservative party:

“We’ve lied to you before.

“We’re lying to you now.

“We’ll lie to you again.

“We’re nothing if not consistent.”

Now, if that doesn’t ring true for the conservatives at Queens’ Park in Toronto, you have not been paying attention over the past four years.

I mention this because I am going to have lots of time to study this election. The liberal candidate in my riding is the mayor of Barrie. I helped him get elected mayor 12 years ago. He probably thinks I’m too old to help in this campaign. I hear that he and his canvas teams have been out knocking on doors in the riding for the past month and getting a good reception.

With his name recognition and the disappearing act over the past four years of the carpet bagger Ford appointed to run here last time, there is little conjecture on the outcome. This riding will be a liberal win from the conservatives.

And that is the way this election needs to go. It is a riding-by-riding battle. Just assume there are no leaders. Ford is a blowhard and incompetent. Horwath of the NDP is a nebbish as leader of the opposition who did little to curb Ford over the past four years. And I have absolutely no idea how good a leader Del Duca might be for the liberals. Wherever he has been since chosen leader, we have heard little that sounds liberal and little leadership.

What you need to do is ignore the leaders of the parties and vote for the best candidate in your electoral district. It means you need to listen if a canvasser comes to your door. You need to read that literature they hand you. You have the responsibility in this election to elect the best candidate. And I don’t care if one of those candidates is your bother-in-law. It is a secret ballot.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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For Ford’s Friends.

by Peter Lowry

It was an unusual budget day last Thursday in Ontario. It was a day to hear about the election for those with money inside the legislature while the poor paraded outside. 

And Mr. Ford never flinched. Did you notice that much of the offered goodies of his budget benevolence were in the form of tax credits? It means you need to first spend money, to get money. Tax credits only come to those who have already spent their money. And don’t forget, you have to keep records; you have to keep receipts.

‘There you go seniors,’ Mr. Ford says, ‘Spend and your heirs will be rewarded.’

Meanwhile the pitiful poor, the sick, the disabled and the mentally challenged of Ontario, are trying to live and eat on less than $1200 per month. The Ford government drives them to begging, stealing and sleeping on the streets.

Don’t forget the billions, Mr. Ford needs to build highway 413 for his friends. And forget the environment. Mr. Ford will save you a nickel on every liter of gas, at close to $2, that you pump.

Not that you should worry. Mr. Ford’s deficit will only be $20 billion. Are you sure that is a conservative budget? Our children’s children could still be paying for that in the distant future. God forbid that the damn conservatives would try to help the poor, the hungry and the needy.

Doug Ford thinks of himself as a benevolent dictator. He promises you a buck-a-beer and never delivers. Electing this guy, the first time, was an accident. Re-electing him would be downright stupid.

Ford’s promises and performance during the worst of the pandemic were erratic and confusing. He has left Ontario with exhausted and angry hospital staffs and frustrated teachers. He ignored the problems caused by the convoy in Ottawa in February. He told Ontario residents not to go to their cottages and went himself. He thinks the problems of COVID-19 are over because he wants to campaign for re-election. We should make election day, June 2, a day of mourning for all those who died during the pandemic. We should put the blame for many of those deaths where they belong.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Mayday, Mayday.

by Peter Lowry

It’s election time in Ontario. And the voters are desperate. They need help. The Ford conservatives have been campaigning for months. The hapless new democrats came up with a bunch of promises last week and we are only starting to hear murmurs from the liberals. The problem is that Mr. Ford seems to be the only one itching for an election.

But any election is a siren song to me. Since Joe Noseworthy won back my riding of York South for the CCF in 1949, I have been fascinated with the election process. And, for the most of the last 70 years, I have been lending my expertise to the liberal party.

One of the less advertised and more difficult tasks I did was working with polls and pollsters. I mention this as I read the other day where the Toronto Star is going to publish a poll aggregation called the Signal during the provincial campaign. The Star calls it an ‘election predictor.’ It is run by a political science professor. If there is any advice I could give to the neophyte owners of the Toronto Star is that the odds of getting anything right in polling are about as good as the odds of players winning at the Star owners’ new Internet casino.

You always have to remember that results of a poll are a somewhat clouded version of the past. They cannot predict the future.

And what really causes problems with political polls is that people tell lies. They tell you they are going to vote and then they don’t. As many as 35 per cent of the voters in a given riding will fail to vote.

And those who do vote can change their mind. As late as when standing behind that little screen, ballot in hand and pencil at the ready, people will have second thoughts.

I have often thought that universities might have dropped political science at the same time as they threw out the alchemists. I have always appreciated that political science grads know the difference between a liberal and a libertarian but poli-sci is not a course in sociology. They study how people vote but never seem to understand why.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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Feel the Anger.

by Peter Lowry

The frustration with COVID-19 keeps growing. Canadians are tired of the distancing, the damn masks and the stupid elbow bumping. We all want our lives back. And the politicians aren’t helping.

In Ontario, the politicians have other fish to fry. We are going to have an election called in another week—in case you hadn’t noticed all the electioneering. The Ford conservatives have been straight out campaigning for the past two months. Maybe they feel they’ve the most to lose. And they should.

But there seems to be some confusion about what this election is about. It is certainly not about long-term care facilities. The only people who have right to be concerned about that are those in ill-health and in their late 80s or 90s and their families.

I think Mr. Ford’s most serious enemy in this campaign will be that smarmy MP Pierre Poilievre. He is going around giving conservatism a bad name. He is pandering to the angry and the ignorant. He is promising free-form protesting to all. He is making foolish promises that we expect any sensible person to suspect.

For that hopeless Horwath and the emerging Del Duca to be arguing about who has the best plan for publicly-funded long-term care for Ontario is not going to help either of them.

Long-term care in this province is serious but there are other issues. There is a long-term approach to COVID-19 to address. There is a serious inflationary spiral that has to be alleviated. There is a serious shortage of decent rental accommodation in our province. We need more medical training and graduates. And then we need to pay them properly.

We certainly don’t need to learn that our senior management in our hospitals are topping the province’s sunshine list. We have far too much management and not enough nurses.

And you can hardly say that we will have more teachers and pay them properly. First you have to train the teachers.

What is desperately needed is a statement from each of the parties that encapsulates what they are planning for the province. If they are unable to come up with a statement, the voters will provide it. And the parties are unlikely to like it.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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What’s in a Name?

by Peter Lowry

When you live in a large city, you find naming streets and places more difficult as time goes on. Proposed names have to be researched. Maybe not to the extent that the Roman church checks out its saints but you have to be wary of later embarrassments.

But I am sure many of us are sick and tired of this constant witch hunt for people in the past who might have made a mistake in judgement. I think this particularly relates to heroes such as Egerton Ryerson (1803 to 1882) and Sir John A. Macdonald (1815 to 1891).

I think those people running Ryerson University failing to charge the nincompoops who tore down Ryerson’s statue did far worse than anything Ryerson did in his lifetime. Defacing that statue was a criminal offense. Ryerson did a lot of good in his lifetime. He created Ontario’s public school system. He also helped design the residential school system and Sir John A. Macdonald signed off on it. And ‘Metropolitan Toronto University’ is a stupid name. I will just continue calling it ‘Ryerson.’

John A. and old Egerton did what they thought was a good thing at the time. They might not have been aware of a weakness among the Roman church’s celibate clerics. They failed to recognize the harm they were doing in separating the children from their parents and they failed to protect the children from their minders.

And it is hardly the worst mistake in Sir John A. Macdonald’s lifetime. He was not only a drunkard; he was also a conservative. Yet, he contributed a great deal to the founding of this country and deserves our respect for that.

But we need to do something about this naming problem. Maybe we would be better off if we just numbered streets and avenues. And you should only sell naming rights once. I miss a place called SkyDome in Toronto. The same for the O’Keefe Centre.

I remember one time when our council member in North York was telling us that a nearby nature walk was to be named after his mother. I told him that it would be wrong because she was still alive. He was even more annoyed with me when I said she still had time to rob a bank.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

Better Build Bradford Bypass.

by Peter Lowry

Damn the greed of Doug Ford’s Ontario conservatives. They have told their developer friends that they will build highway 413. The idea of 413 had been killed by the Wynne liberals because it wasn’t needed. Yet the Bradford Bypass was already in process and is needed. Ford got the two projects linked and has created a protest movement against both highways.

The Bradford Bypass is a 16.2-kilometer stretch of controlled-access four-lane highway designed to take traffic from highway 404 past Bradford to highway 400 so that it can go around Lake Simcoe. And you should be warned that anyone who lives north of highway 88 (that runs through Bradford) or has a summer cottage in Muskoka, understands the need for the bypass.

If you wanted to challenge the government on whether homes in Bradford are more important than a couple fairways in a conservative-owned golf course, have at it. It is far to late to stop the Bradford Bypass.

This short piece of highway has been in the works for the past 25 years. All the studies have been done. Many millions of dollars that have already been spent on environmental studies, rights of way, designs, overpasses and related road improvements.

And if you ever happen to be driving north on highway 400 from highway 88, you will notice all those new overpasses that have been built or are still in the works to eventually accommodate the heavier traffic that is anticipated in years to come.

I can assure you that my environmental concerns are a match or maybe even better than yours. I have had many years of appearing before councils, boards, commissions and parliamentary committees. When you do that, you need to have your facts well documented

But as a resident of Barrie, Ontario, I find it very annoying that I have to drive through Newmarket, Ontario to get from highway 400 to highway 404 when going to the east end of Toronto. That 16.2-kilometer bypass to highway 404 will likely save me about a half hour in driving time every time I use it.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Muddy Middle.

by Peter Lowry

The conservative party’s current leadership contest is muddying the question of where the party sits in the political spectrum. The party has tried right of centre with Andrew Scheer, somewhere in the muddy middle with Erin O’Toole and just where it is headed with the current batch of candidates is a good question. Maybe it should be an important question for candidates to address in the upcoming leadership debates.

Frankly, I have never been satisfied with the picture of Canada’s major political parties posing as ‘big tent’ parties. It is really more of a copout than a workable political solution. I joined the liberal party back when it was running under the banner of Medicare. It came as a shock to me to find that there were opponents to Medicare still in the party.

And then when Paul Martin Junior practically destroyed Medicare running out of control as Jean Chrétien’s right-finance minister, I was left wondering what was a passionate progressive’s position. Like many caring progressives, I could find no alternative.

Confusion was complete in my mind when Tom Mulcair backed the new democrats into the crowded middle ground in 2015. It led to his downfall as leader two years later and his departure from politics. Mind you, in comparison to Jagmeet Singh, Mulcair at least knew where he wanted to go.

With both Patrick Brown and Jean Charest heading for the muddy middle in this year’s conservative leadership, you can understand why Pierre Poilievre is making good use of a populist approach. He is spouting right-of-centre dogma of limited government and lower taxes. Whether he would actually do that would be a matter of conjecture. He can ridicule Brown and Charest as light liberals, all he likes, but there is a strong faction within the conservative party that despised the truckers’ convoy and did not approve of Poilievre embracing the participants.

Despite the mistake he might be making, if I was on Pierre Poilievre’s team, I would argue strongly to stay with the present tack. It is beginning to look like his only chance is to win on the first ballot. He is burning his boats for second choice votes.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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The Simplicity of Poilievre.

by Peter Lowry

It is important to remember that Donald Trump caught Americans off guard with what Hillary Clinton described as his basket of deplorables. There are similar types of deplorables in Canada you know. And trust a weasel like conservative MP Pierre Poilievre to try to politicize them. He will have some trouble signing them up to the conservative party, yet he can be betting on the large numbers who turn out for his campaign. He is the first Canadian politician to make conservative politics interesting to the hoi polloi since John George Diefenbaker.

I remember, many years ago, arguing with my late friend Keith Davey about sending MP Judy LaMarsh and the “Truth Squad” to Diefenbaker’s rallies back in the 1960s. ‘Dief’ would welcome them and ask them to sit up front where everyone could see them. I felt that the point that Diefenbaker could wander from the truth was being covered very well by the news media. It was probably only two rallies that they attended but Keith thought Judy’s truth squad brought the problem of Dief’s creative approach to truth into sharper focus.

But Poilievre, as a phony Prairie populist, seems to have better writers than Diefenbaker. I was listening to part of his speech at the Steam Whistle Brewery the other day and I actually think he is dumbing down his language to connect with his dumber audiences. He was saying: “I dunno” in answer to his own rhetorical questions. Yet, he usually speaks in a more clipped style.

And speaking of the Steam Whistle event, did you know that the little worm is going around bad-mouthing the company. He stands up in from of his followers and in social media on the Internet to tell them that this brewery waters its beer. We all know that water is a very important ingredient in beer. Poilievre just says it in a nasty way. I hope the brewery continues to stay silent. He would love to have the attention.

I think Poilievre was one of the few Canadian politicians who actually used the pandemic to further his aggressive agenda. As soon as the Zoom meetings of parliamentary committees were launched, he had the best lighting and background of any member of parliament. That guy doesn’t miss a trick. He is a sleaze. As one of the two career politicians running in this year’s conservative leadership contest, he makes Brampton mayor, Patrick Brown, look like a country yokel.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Bitcoin Boosters Beware.

by Peter Lowry

At times, you just shake your head and quietly ask yourself, ‘What’s the use?’ You try to warn cryptocurrency advocates and they think they know what they are doing. There are more people speaking out against these pseudo currencies now and the bitcoin boosters have been warned by the Bank of Canada.

And the Bank of Canada is not in competition with bitcoin or any of the other cryptocurrencies. They are interested in them only in the sense that they need to understand the phenomenon. While it might be the best known of them is called bitcoin, it is not money. It is, at best, a hypothetical investment. Yet, what the bank found out in their studies was that most Canadian bitcoin owners were not financially literate. And they did not seem to understand the risk involved in taking an ownership position in bitcoin.

In a series of studies between 2018 and 2020, it was determined that about five per cent of Canadians were actively involved with bitcoin. The Bank of Canada researchers tell us that the bitcoin owners were, mainly male, younger and educated, with high household incomes. They understood the technology involved and the block chain, yet saw the ownership as an investment.

It was interesting that the bank decided to release their studies at this time. It is when MP Pierre Poilievre is currently campaigning to win the leadership of Canada’s conservative party and supporting bitcoin ownership. Like many of his claims, Mr. Poilievre tends to wander from the truth. He reminds us more of former U.S. president Donald Trump than any conservative we have ever known. The inflation that is besetting all currencies today is hardly unique to Canada nor to be blamed on our prime minister.

The researchers did not say it but I will: The ownership of bitcoin is, at best, a poorly managed tontine (that is an investment club that gives all the money in the pot to the last person alive) or just a form of gambling where nobody wins.

Some people also accuse it of being a Ponzi scheme without a Mr. Ponzi. What it really is would best be described as a foolish fad that will pass on to more interesting challenges in the years ahead.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]