Category: New

Quebec’s fight on the right.

by Peter Lowry

It looks like Jean Charest has overestimated his conservative party credentials in Quebec. He hardly has the time to sign up CPC members one at a time. He needs to have large blocks of memberships handed to him. Ideally, he needs the 50,000 provincial conservatives of Éric Duhaime—which does not seem likely—to add the federal party to their memberships. Otherwise, he needs Quebec premier François Legault to take his provincial Coalition Avenir Québec members into the federal fold—which is even less likely.

But one thing for sure, there seems to be a plethora of conservative parties in Quebec these days. In addition to Duhaime’s provincial conservatives and Legault’s right-of-centre CAQ, there are Maxime Bernier’s libertarians in the Peoples’ Party and the right of centre Quebec liberals. And the pollsters put the two remaining viable parties, the initially left-of-centre Parti Québécois and Québec Solidaire, as drifting in the doldrums.

Talking to people in the Atlantic provinces the other day, I got the impression that Jean Charest was doing better in in the Atlantic than in his home province. I also suspect, Charest will have strong first and second votes in Ontario.

Charest is no darling of the west. If he gets more than a few second or third choice votes west of the Ontario border, he’ll be lucky.

Our myopic media in Canada seem to be driving MP Pierre Poilievre into the lead in the conservative race. Mind you, he would have to be running well ahead of the pack in the first count. I suspect that, as it appears now, if Poilievre can hit 35 per cent or more of the first votes, he could go on to win. Anything less than that and he could fall by the wayside. Poilievre is not an unknown. He is a weasel but some people like weasels. It is just hard to dope out which conservatives would consider him as second choice.

Of course, the real problem is the way conservatives structure their frequent leadership contests. They do not seem to understand the cliché that if you keep doing things the same way, you are never going to like the results.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Keening of Kenney.

by Peter Lowry

It seems Alberta’s premier has decided to play out the tragedy of his time in Alberta politics. He was so eager and ready seven years ago when he bought a pick-up, a ten-gallon hat and fat-boy jeans and headed home for Alberta. It was Ottawa’s loss and the Alberta legislature’s gain. It was when many conservatives thought he should have followed Stephen Harper as leader and help rebuild the federal Tories.

But Jason Kenney knew well what he was doing. His path and strategy were carefully considered and planned. He easily took over the dispirited Alberta provincial conservative party. He was eager to accommodate when he united the right. He knew the key was in shutting down the Wildrose party. The distraction that worked for him was the success of the Alberta new democrats. Few made note early enough of Kenney’s rampant misogyny and his take-no-prisoners approach to politics.

But it was classic Kenney delivering his speech to the United Conservative Party faithful last Saturday in Red Deer. Most of the 45 minutes of customary conservative rhetoric was grinding at the inbred fear of a return to the ‘socialist’ new democrats and their leader Rachel Notley. He admitted that he might not be perfect but hopefully the listeners would forgive and forget about the billions of taxpayer dollars wasted on pipelines that could not be built.

He glibly asked for forgiveness while clutching at the one last arrow in his quiver. He knew it was the bitter and those wanting blood who came to Red Deer for the party conclave. He was talking to about 16,000 live bodies and more at home watching his speech streamed to them.

But it will be the party’s 60,000 some members who are invited to vote on his future. He is betting on those stay-at-home voters to keep him employed as leader of the united conservatives and premier of Alberta.

It takes time for those ballots to be delivered to 60,000 voters. You have to give them time to consider it and then Canada Post time to return the ballots. And, since it takes time to carefully count those ballots, the results will not be announced until May 18. And that is plenty of time for Kenney to find a way to cheat his defeat by a really angry party.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Fool and His Bitcoin.

by Peter Lowry

You asked “Who will protect your money?” It won’t be the Bitcoin miners. It won’t be MP Pierre Poilievre. In fact, Poilievre is using the Bitcoin confusion to try to add to his votes in the conservative leadership race. He might add some miss-led support to his campaign but in the long-run, the Bitcoin believers are the ones who will lose.

The simple reason to be a skeptic of Poilievre’s Bitcoin BS is that no responsible conservative MP would support Bitcoin over the Bank of Canada. The Bank of Canada controls the Canadian dollar. Nobody other than the collectors control Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

And, critically important, is the simple question, “How does Bitcoin protect anyone from inflation?” The answer that Bitcoin is finite is capricious. Why should this supposed limitation on Bitcoin prevent it from inflationary influences? Inflation can impact Bitcoin in exactly the same way as a Loonie that sits in your dresser drawer. It is as simple as the price of a loaf of bread.

A loaf of bread starts on a potentially inflationary spiral when the farmer procures his seed and operates his cultivator. The cost of the seed is followed by the price of fuel for the cultivator and the other farm equipment. The price of the wheat is determined by the size of the year’s crop, along with world prices, storage costs and shipping costs. Then there are milling costs, bakery equipment, shipping to stores and employee wages. And finally, a loaf of bread appears on the grocery shelf and you wonder why the grocer has to charge so much for one lonely loaf.

It is not the Bank of Canada’s fault that the price of that loaf of bread went up, again. Bitcoin could hardly have any influence. The difference is that the Bank of Canada has oversight on the world economy. It can influence our domestic economy through the manipulation of bank interest rates, and yes, by the judicious borrowing and printing of money.

Since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Bank of Canada has worked to assist Canadians in alleviating pressures on our Canadian money. Bitcoin is not included. As noted above, the fool and his Bitcoin are soon parted.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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The Timorous Legacy.

by Peter Lowry

Former premier Kathleen Wynne stood in the Ontario legislature last week for her farewell speech to that house. It was not an inspiring moment but her speech was gracious. And if she is not worried about her legacy, she should be.

Wynne was premier of Canada’s most populous province for five years. She was not only the first woman premier but the first openly gay woman premier. Yet, her rule was timorous. If she felt something was worth doing, she would do it in small increments.

Would you believe that her legacy is beer and wine in the large grocery stores? Watching her government roll out beer in grocery stores was an exercise similar to watching paint dry. On her schedule, it would be 2050 before beer is available in a convenience store.

Compared to Wynne, Doug Ford is on the lunatic fringe of the “let’s do it” types. He let restaurants get into the off-premises sale of beer and wine with little or no fanfare. He is an excellent example of the business chief executive officer who is hired for the ability to make decisions. You expect this person to be wrong at least 50 per cent of the time.

Wynne spoke in measured terms while Ford is brash. Wynne shared credit with others in her government while Ford hogs much of the publicity.

Wynne wanted a $15 minimum wage four years ago. Ford canceled it and reinstated it this year.

Wynne wanted, once again, to try a guaranteed annual income, Ford canceled the trial.

Where Wynne would vacillate, Ford plows straight ahead.

Ford is a blowhard where Wynne is a bit of a prune.

Wynne kept Ontario Lottery and Gaming under constraint while Doug Ford is blowing the lid off their operations.

Wynne had some heart and treated the poor and impoverished with concern. Ford takes money away from the desperate and hopes to find more.

Ford says how hard the nurses have worked through the pandemic and puts the screws on their salaries. Wynne spoke the teachers’ language and got their cooperation.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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A ‘No Future’ Budget.

by Peter Lowry

Whatever happened to ‘Building Back Better?’ Conservative Pierre Poilievre could have written that budget speech from finance minister Cynthia Freeland. Just who the hell she was out to impress, nobody seems to know. This was not a budget in which a liberal could take any pride.

Canada can have a prosperous future but it takes leadership and determination to take us there. It requires the attitudes and the expenditures that create the future that Canadians want for their country. It has to start now on the infrastructure. It has to have leadership from someone who can see that future.

Dental care and prescription drugs should have been a part of Medicare years ago. It was a logical progression that was delayed by the lack of effective leadership. Singh and his colleagues are living in the past.

A Toronto Star writer suggested that Freeland was pacifying what she calls ‘blue liberals.’ She is likely referring to the ones who call themselves social liberals and economic conservatives. They have always been an embarrassment to the liberal party. The worst is former prime minister Paul Martin. Paul was the one who advised liberals to campaign from the left and rule from the right.

It was Paul who opened the door to the Harper conservatives a couple decades back. The voters looked at the choice between a conservative liberal and a real conservative and opted for the real thing. The first Paul Martin who died in 1992 was a progressive. His son, Paul, was a regressive.

Back to the budget, I do agree that something has to be done about the high price of homes in Canada. In our climate, shelter cannot be a luxury item. We have to have adequate, safe, warm shelter for all. The proposals in the Freeland budget for home building seem inadequate at best and foolish at the worst. The problem is an industry that is milking the inflation. It needs to be forced to build what people need.   

It is far too early to worry about the pandemic deficit. I know nobody wants to admit that the pandemic is still with us but you can hardly wish it away. The finance department has both carrots and sticks at its disposal. Freeland has to learn how to use them.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

Profiteering in Food.

by Peter Lowry

That young guy who runs Canada’s Weston Empire appears to be getting ahead of the game. He can enthusiastically raise prices in Loblaws, Zehrs, No Frills, Provigo, Superstore or Shoppers Drug Mart and the other chains will follow. The only question is why is he raising them more than necessary? It is when he contributes to the rising cost of living in Canada that the word ‘profit’ becomes ‘profiteering.’

Does the Weston heir think that nobody will notice? There are many people across Canada who know how to compute what something should cost. Grocers might not put their thumb on the meat scale very often but it is easy enough to compute what it costs to bring a product to the grocery shelf.

One of the reasons the wife likes to take me along grocery shopping is that I know meats and can quickly compute if so-called bargains are really a bargain. It comes from my early training in supermarket store management. Yes, I was trained by two different grocery chains in my youth.

Maybe things were a bit simpler then but the basics have changed very little. The highest mark-up in the stores is in the produce department. Controlling waste and keeping product fresh and inviting has changed little over the years.

Meat is a different story. While still a major profit contributor, fewer and fewer butchers are actually on the premise. Precut, prepackaged meats are most often from central cutting and packaging operations. Stores with real butchers are rare but always interesting, if they have time to chat. In store bakeries were rare when I was in the business as are the occasional fish counters today.

But the heavy lifting in the large grocery stores of today is still left to the grocery department with its stocks of canned and bottled goods, paper products and dairy and frozen foods.

What worries me today is the government involvement in developing a code of conduct between the grocers and their suppliers. I think we need to keep the tensions. We need the tensions to eliminate the collusion between suppliers and retailers. We certainly have to have some strong competition to keep the giants of the industry from just getting richer.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Which Ten is that?

by Peter Lowry

Ontario has bought into the federal government’s “Ten Dollars a day” daycare deal. That is what everyone calls it. And most people realize it is not going to happen overnight. What puzzles me though is this payment going to be in 2022- ten dollars or in 2027-ten dollars?

The way inflation is galloping along, it is very hard to say what a Canadian ten-dollar bill will be worth in five years.

It was good to see that finance minister Chystia Freeland knows that we are not going to be able to train a quarter million new daycare workers overnight. And, obviously, there will need to be a lot more daycare centres. These need to be built, staffed and in operation to serve the needs. And feel assured, if we build them, the kids will come.

Maybe the question of value will be solved if Pierre Poilievre wins the lottery being run by the conservatives to choose a new leader. As conservative leader, he seems to want to campaign on making Bitcoin the Canadian currency. We would probably need to keep our phone batteries charged, in that event. I checked and saw that a bitcoin was being quoted at over C$54,000. You would never want to make a decimal point error in Mr. Poilievre’s world.

What worries me though is that there are obviously going to be many daycare spaces in different daycares. They are not all going to be cookie-cutter daycares. Will not some of these daycares be more desirable than others? Will there not be extras? Is there a surcharge for chocolate milk instead of two-percent?  Is having junior in this daycare over that daycare going to be more prestigious? Will there be some where the drop-off and pick-up is more convenient? You never really know what junior or his parents will prefer.

I do not want to be a skeptic but there will be many cookie-cutter daycares and there will also be the innovators. And that is life. And if you don’t think lots of operators will find ways to get around the limit of ten bucks, you do not know human nature.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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Dumbing Down with Doug.

by Peter Lowry

If there is one thing Ontario voters can agree on is that Ontario premier Doug Ford is not the brightest star in the sky over Queen’s Park. When he thinks he has an idea that might appeal to voters, he will ride the idea into the ground.

Take his recent sticker idea. He knows that the actual sticker that shows you have paid for your vehicle license this year is worth a fraction of a cent.  He is going to give back the money you paid. It should come with a note reminding you to vote conservative in the coming election.

All it did was remind people of the stickers he had made to add confusion on the province’s gas pumps. It was finally a judge who got rid of that nonsense.

But how about his latest promise. If you vote conservative on June 2, he will roll back five cents of the Ontario gasoline tax—just for the rest of the year. You have got to figure that this guy doesn’t often get to fill up his limousine.

How did you like his preening for the television cameras at General Motors the other day? Here is the guy who killed the provincial grants for people buying electric cars four years ago taking the credit for General Motors being bribed to built pickups in Oshawa, Ontario and—eventually—some electric vehicles in Ingersoll, Ontario. What do you want to bet that the deal was engineered by the federal people in Ottawa?

Doug thinks he should get the credit. What he fails to understand is that with accepting the credit for something, you also have to take responsibility for the down sides. It is like the current situation with COVID-19. If the conservatives want the credit for declaring that the pandemic is over in Ontario, then we should not be hearing about more people in hospital and in the ICUs and dying. Which is what we are hearing.

On the positive side, it time for the Ontario government to proceed with the Bradford Bypass. There is no reason though to proceed with Highway 413. It is not needed by anyone other than Doug Ford’s developer friends.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

What the Weasel Wants.

by Peter Lowry

It might seem disorganized to some politicos but the meanness of MP Pierre Poilievre’s campaign for the conservative leadership is coming into focus. He is befriending the conservative party’s extremists.

Poilievre is appealing to the hardened right wing of conservatism. Yet, he is not really a doctrinaire conservative. He is like a weasel appealing selectively to groups such as the Bitcoin proponents, the Freedom Convoy and the libertarians still within the conservative party, as well as the callow youth in a hurry and Canadian admirers of America’s Donald Trump.

But within this vale of lost souls, he promotes his eventual failure.

He is going against conservative tradition in attacking the Bank of Canada. For someone who can so maliciously malign the financial planning of other parties, he is promoting the fiction of cryptocurrency. Nobody wants others to control the currency—until you need someone to protect your savings.

The weasel is the pal of the people who came to party on Ottawa streets through February of this year. Maybe he would like to help pay the bill for cleaning up their mess.  

But in his successes, he is building his failure. What we are seeing in this contest is three or four of the leaders in the race dividing up maybe 70 per cent of the party to their cause. You have to look at their second or third choice selection before you can figure out who can win the brass ring. This is the dangerous consequence of preferential voting. What you want to know at this stage is who would be so foolish as to make Poilievre their second, third or even fourth choice?

Not Jean Charest’s supporters. His base is Quebec. He can expect little of the west. He might honour the deal with Patrick Brown who would be strong in Ontario. My guess would be that Brown could make it to the at least the fourth count of the ballots. It makes sense that his voters in Ontario would have Charest as their second choice. If I were a betting person, I would be inclined to make a trifecta bet on Charest in first place, Poilievre in second and Brown in third.

But the way this vote is manipulated with the preferential vote and all electoral districts being treated as equal, it’s anyone’s guess.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

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A Dying Breed.

by Peter Lowry

It was a picture of Canada’s first nations’ representatives with the Bishop of Rome that got me thinking. Where are the anachronisms in this picture? And who are the people of faith?

It was the central figure in the white smock that got me thinking. He is the head of a dying religion. The opulent churches around the world have fewer parishioners these days and fewer funds to support the hierarchy in Rome. The funds they probably have set aside for a rainy day might be coming in to play. Even an audience chamber such as where the photograph was taken is expensive to keep in good repair.

But the Pope and his handlers made good use of the occasion. They welcomed the first nations, Metis and others who share ancestors that came to North America thousands of years ago. They came to Rome in the headdresses and fashions of their peoples. I guess Phil Fontaine, who normally wears a fedora, came in his plains Indian war bonnet—earned, I expect, for his hard work as elected chief of the assembly of first nations. He had been to Rome before on this quest. He saw Pope Benedict in 2009. Benedict brushed off the delegation.

But did they come to Rome to air their grievances or to make peace with their church? The Pope’s apology was no redress for the church’s failure to protect the children put in its care. If the church’s original intent was to proselytize, it did a poor job of it.

Canada has paid the price many times over for the failure of the residential schools. It is easy to understand the lack of trust for the society that takes your children and fails to return them all to you. Unmarked graves do not paint a picture of a responsible guardianship.

What I fail to understand is the competitive attitude of the various communities in inviting the Pope to visit some of our first nations. Why? Is he really interested in the oral histories he will hear? It seems to me that it would make more sense to ban any unmarried Catholic priest from coming onto first nations lands.

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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]