Category: Provincial Politics

Building on the Brand.

by Peter Lowry

Can you believe that the liberals in Ontario will have a new leader next week and the Ford conservatives are going to pay to introduce her to Ontario voters. Ford and friends think they will turn the voters against her but the ad campaign will more likely be laughed at. It will just be added to the overly long list of dumb moves by the Ford conservatives.

And Bonnie Crombie will be standing there laughing at them. They should never make the mistake of thinking she is a young inexperienced woman. She proved in the recent liberal campaign for the provincial leadership that she can handle experienced politicians. And she won the leadership despite the hinky rules that said all electoral districts are equal. Down the road when next someone says one member, one vote, liberals should make sure their votes really are equal.

In a way, Bonnie Crombie reminds me of her mentor Hazel McCallion. Hazel was already mayor of Streetsville when I first met her. She must have been in her 50s. And she was smart and savvy then. She quickly proved that she was equal to and better than many of her fellow Mississauga councillors. When she went for the mayoralty, she knew I was rooting for her. Her craggy face was always smiling for me when we met.

The edge that Bonnie Crombie has is her Disney training in Anaheim, California. I have never worked with a politician trained by the great showman’s brand. I think there is a trust in the brand. After all, everybody loves Cinderella.

When you build on a brand such as that, you are building on a brand that is loved around the world. The millions of visitors that visit the Disney sites prove it year after year.

When Ford attacks Crombie, he will only prove that he is still a crass boor. I have no idea what he will attack her on. It really doesn’t matter. Most people would not guess that Bonnie Crombie is in her sixties. They would jump to her defense in the same way as you would for Snow White.

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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry            

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Don’t Cry for Ford Ontario.

by Peter Lowry

Some times you just have to take it on the chin and carry on regardless. We heard the other day that the Ontario conservatives might not be having a dinner to honour their leader this year. They will still bow low and do what he says but they seem worried about the ongoing RCMP investigation of his dealings with developers in the Ontario Greenbelt and probably along the ill-fated Highway 413 as well.

If the conservative party followed Mr. Trump’s example in the United States, they would stick to routine. You can be sure that the Republican Party is carrying on with programs to crown Mr. Trump as their candidate. There is nothing the few malcontents who had their eyes on the nomination, can do about it. And while the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to consider the challenges to Mr. Trump running for president, you have to remember that most of the Supreme Court judges are Republican appointees.  

But in Canada our politicians are citizens and no citizen is above the law.

It would be very expensive for the Ontario to pass up on a leader’s dinner this year. The last leader’s dinner put some $6 million in the conservatives’ bank account. And they might need it if they are going to pay for a campaign to defame the new liberal leader. That might be a far more expensive chore than they imagined.

Bonnie Crombie’s credibility is hardly built on nothing. She was backed by the well-known and respected late Hazel McCallion who preceded her in the Mississauga mayoralty. Nobody faults the excellent job Crombie has done while mayor. Her grasp of the issues, her work ethic, her public approval are all to be considered before being foolish enough to try to tear her down.

And why is she leaving the mayoralty in Ontario’s fourth largest city? As mayor, she has seen how Doug Ford has failed to keep faith with Ontario. As a former member of parliament, she has seen the need for the different levels of government to keep faith with the voters. Let’s face it, she has far more experience in Canadian politics than Doug Ford. Ford lurches from one mistake to another. He hardly wants her attacking him in the Ontario legislature.

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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry            

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Losing Like Legault.

by Peter Lowry

It looked like good news. It said that Quebec premier François Legault was losing ground in Quebec politics. It was like the news that your mother-in-law has been killed in an accident while driving your brand-new car. The insurance company will look after the car, but you are really going to miss your mother-in-law. Would it be the same if we did not have Legault to complain about any more?

The man is a bigot, you know. He hates having anglos in Quebec. He tries to bar immigrants who do not speak French. He doesn’t even want Quebec’s English language universities to bring students from other parts of Canada. He certainly doesn’t do much for Quebec tourism.

And what would you expect from a right-wing politician who tramples our Charter of Human rights and Freedoms. He wants a unilingual Quebec in a bilingual Canada.

I like to think of Legault as the “Missing Link.” It is a euphemism for his Third Link which is supposed to be for a tunnel under the St. Lawrence River between Quebec City and its suburbs south of the river. It is one of those on-again-off-again promises that politicians play with depending on their mood.

Having had to use the ferry between the city and Lévis on the south shore a few times, I would vote for a tunnel myself. After all, if the English and the French can have a Chunnel under the English Channel, why can’t Quebec connect with its own south shore? Though I did hear something about the Chunnel to Europe springing a leak the other day. That did not sound good.

The last time I checked on this tunnel scheme the provincial education minister was crying about it in the legislature. That did not sound good either. The tunnel is off again.

In a vain attempt to regain voter approval in the Quebec City area, premier Legault and his fellow hockey enthusiasts in the legislature offered the voters a couple pre-season hockey games in Quebec City by the Los Angeles Kings. The bribe came just after telling Quebecers that there had to be some belt tightening—such as cutting funding for the province’s food banks by $8 million. When it was mentioned that the Los Angeles Kings would cost the government $7 million, it put a damper on the plan.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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The Unlucky 413.

by Peter Lowry

Premier Doug Ford of Ontario thinks our federal environment minister is an extremist. Last month he was ranting and raving about federal politicians who seemed negative towards his proposed Highway 413.  It does seem unfair that after the Greenbelt fiasco, that some of his best friends are going to also lose their investments in land around the unneeded Highway 413.

Mr. Ford’s problem might be that he does not seem to be superstitious. He might never have noticed that there is no Highway 13 in Ontario. The 400 series of highways are always named after the former two or four-lane highway they supplement or replace. The only nearby highways to which Highway 413 would compete with for traffic are Highway 407, the toll road which is under utilized because of its high tolls, and further south again, Highway 401, which is heavily used because truckers cannot afford the Highway 407 tolls.

But when you consider that Highway 407 was initially designed as the Toronto bypass to take pressure off Highway 401, you realize how stupid it was for the former Harris conservative government in Ontario to sell off the highway for a toll road. Instead of taking the trucks off the Toronto section of Highway 401, it is now forcing trucks to use the 401.  

The proposed new highway, now called Highway 413, was originally suggested as the GTA West Project and was only in case of a major increase in development in the Georgetown and Halton Hills area of the province. It might have a use if it did not run from a very high traffic location on Highway 400 on the East, just 52 kilometres west to another traffic problem where Hwy 407 joins Hwy 401 traffic, and where the volume of traffic could produce traffic jams of monumental proportions.

Doug Ford complains that the federal environment minister is deliberately trying to delay his Highway 413. He might be right. While the Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government had “overstepped” its constitutional authority in demanding an impact assessment of the highway project, the federal government is studying how to make the study acceptable to the court.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Are They Pestering You?

by Peter Lowry

One of the things I learned early in running elections is to work closely with your fundraisers. Money is not always the solution but it sure helps. I should not have to admit it but liberals, who are tired of all the pleas for money in their computer in-basket every day, can blame me if they like. It was about 60 years ago that I told the Ontario executive of the liberal party that the then 75,000 dues-paying members of the party in Ontario might like to contribute a few bucks to help win a bye-election that had been called.

Since computer-to-computer communications was in its infancy at the time, I was asking the board for the postage. All I can say about that first effort was that we did not have to hire extra help to open all the return envelopes.

You can imagine today why I have more than one e-mail address. It means I can get to the important messages faster and sweep the stoop at my convenience.

And I am not the only liberal who has grown tired of the continual pestering by the party. I had a call yesterday from a very generous friend who has already given to the party this year. He is an enthusiastic supporter of Bonnie Crombie and sent the Ontario party $500 from himself and another $500 from his wife. He did not worry about any immediate acknowledgement but he did object to the continued e-mail requests for funds. He says it is reaching the point of harassment.

What it says to me is that the computer experts working for the liberal party are not doing their job. Membership records require constant up-dating. Why would you send a member who gave you more than $100 a request for less? Why would you continue to send lower-valued requests to a generous donor? And why would you send a person, who is a tireless worker for the party in his community, endless requests for money?

In this time of serious inflation there are those who would like to contribute but cannot. They have to put their families first. The party is embarrassing them.

I spent more than 35 years working with companies that made or used computers. None of those machines was stupid but I saw many companies and organizations that failed to use those computers properly.

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Copyright 2024 © Peter Lowry            

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Hope for Hospitals.

by Peter Lowry

If there are any institutions hoping for better times in 2024, it is our hospitals. I believe the problems are happening across Canada but I can better relate to the shambles we are enduring in Ontario. We have a provincial government in this province making a conscious effort to destroy our Medicare.

Elected first in 2018, the conservative government was already cutting funding and disrupting the reasonably effective healthcare system, built over many years, when the pandemic became apparent.  The pandemic has been a struggle for all governments and the Ontario government got through the worst of it by fighting off the wage demands of large groups such as teachers and healthcare workers.

Given the light at the end of the tunnel over COVID, the province left the blame on the hospitals for the disruption and entered a period of encouraging privatization. This dismissal of Medicare was alibied by the private clinics being introduced as a solution to the horrendous backlog in minor to urgent surgeries. Instead of using empty hospital facilities, the surge was on for private clinics—paid for by the money labelled for Medicare. First-off the dime were the millionaire Ophthalmologists. These people are opening private clinics like mushrooms on your lawn. They will do the job for the OHIP payment but you really have to be resistant to their sales pitches for all their wonderful extras they will try to sell you.

But where were the staff coming from for all these private clinics? Doctors were readily available. It was the other medical staff that they enticed from the tight-fisted hospitals. Now the hospitals were unable to deliver. Hospital emergencies were short-staffed to the point of shutting down. When the hospital staffs were able to win more money from the Ontario government, the hospitals were hiring again.

But where did their new staff come from? The hospitals started raiding the family doctors’ offices with these pay hikes. Now the general practitioners were further alienated from the hospitals than they had been before. When the GPs figure out that their real enemy in all of this is the Ontario Medical Association, something smelly is going to hit the fan. All the Ontario government can count on is voter ignorance of what the hell is happening in their province.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Purpose of Politicians.

by Peter Lowry

An interesting discussion with a committed liberal the other day was the question of the purpose of our politicians. He insisted that the answer was as simple as: To spend money. I kept trying to add adjectives to that such as ‘judiciously,’ ‘wisely’ or ‘carefully.’ He wanted to keep it simple, he rejected the suggested adjectives.

I think he had a point. He was not presupposing how they would do the job nor was he holding them to be conservative, liberal or socially conscious of how they did the job. His answer was unswerving in that he considered it important that they spend the money we provide.

What he had not realized in the past was that conservatives hate to spend money and should not be hiding what they do not spend. Liberals have always been described as those ‘Tax and Spend liberals’ and are supposedly prepared to do just that. Socialists have a problem in that they differentiate between the types of spending and they tend to lavish funds on social matters, while tightening spending on matters such as policing, business or higher education.

I do not want to be accused of over-simplification, but if we keep lowering the voting age, we might have to eventually make it that simple.

But I found out that my friend had only recently read the auditor general of Ontario’s report that the Ford government has been socking away public funds that should have been used to improve social services and hospitals and in helping our municipalities build the housing that is so desperately needed.

And this was the conservative administration that ran on a slogan of “A Buck A Beer,” in 2018. They easily defeated a tight-assed liberal government that did not seem to know why it was in power.

You had to be paying close attention in the last years of the Stephen Harper regime in Ottawa to realize that those conservatives, with their majority were salting away money that they told us was for spent on the needs of Canadians. Justin Trudeau and the liberals came to power in 2015, as a breath of fresh air. Yet, even liberals sometimes forget why they are there.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Crombie Causes Concern.

by Peter Lowry

It is good to see that Bonnie Crombie has already put the fear of God into the conservatives at Queen’s Park. While she has already been to the Ontario Legislature to meet with her liberal caucus, the new liberal leader will not be turning in her mayor’s chain of office until January. She wants to leave things shipshape in Mississauga before taking over the liberal reins.

But the conservatives are already firing salvoes of criticisms at her to see if anything will stick. No election is likely in Ontario before June of 2026. Much can happen in the next two years. While Crombie will want to start by visiting electoral districts throughout the province, she also needs to be ready to run in a byelection. The public needs to see her in action in the legislature, for her to be credible in the coming election.

What is particularly amusing in this interim, millionaire Doug Ford is running advertising saying Crombie is an elitist. It does seem odd that when Ford went to such lengths to make some of his developer friends’ billionaires that he is jealous of Ms. Crombie also having a few dollars in the bank.

For those of you who put some stock in the public opinion polls this far from an election, I would be willing to bet you that she has those same polls standing on their heads two years from now.

It is easy to see what our late friend, former Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion saw in her when she supported Crombie to replace her as mayor. She certainly proved that she was more than capable of doing the job. The times I have now seen Bonnie Crombie in action, I can certainly concur with Hazel’s assessment.

But the one thing for certain is that Crombie needs a much stronger and better directed liberal party than Justin Trudeau will have two years from now. There needs to be pride in being a liberal. It needs to be a party that stands beside its elected wing, not under it. And there is nothing wrong with asking liberals, occasionally, to put a few bucks in the collection plate. Just stop the constant begging.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Ford is No Academic.

by Peter Lowry

Earlier this month, Martin Regg Cohn of the Toronto Star tried to tell us that politicians do not care about universities. I thought at the time that I could add something to Regg Cohn’s observations.

The only real difference between Martin Regg Cohn and I is that he is a senior fellow of the sadly renamed Ryerson University and I was only appointed a fellow of McLaughlin College at York University back in the 1970s. All the ‘Fellow’ title really meant back then is you are never paid for anything.

But I enjoyed my role for the college and I think I helped. I particularly enjoyed the times when I would have a lecture hall turned over to me to discuss subjects such as business ethics with business and economics undergrads. It led to travelling around Ontario to many of our universities lecturing business students. Hobnobbing with all those academics, I found they were always willing to unload their financial concerns on the supposedly well-paid business executive.

But I ended up persona non grata at the business school at Western University in London, Ontario. I presented a paper I prepared for a province-wide gathering of business academics at the University of Toronto.  I had criticized Western’s use of the case study method in its business school, for teaching students to be competitive instead of encouraging ethical business practices. What amused me about it was when the Dean of Business at Western called the president of my company (who happened to be a Harvard MBA—Harvard is credited with creating the case study method) to complain about my remarks. The president told the Dean that he had read my presentation and agreed with every word of it.

But back to the cheap politicians in Ontario. Oddly enough there were no loud whimpers from the community colleges and universities in Ontario during the McGinty/Wynne era in government. There seems to be some coming through loud and clear about the Ford administration. If there was an attitude coming out of Queen’s Park, it is the premier’s dislike for his higher education experience. Ford is a loud and opinionated salesman. He dropped out of Humber College after just two months.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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Conservative Comrades?

by Peter Lowry

They are certainly not comrades at arms. Recently Toronto Star writer Martin Reg Cohn wrote that the cancellation of the splitting up Peel region into the stand-alone municipalities of Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon was cancelled at the behest of Brampton mayor Patrick Brown. That would be assuming that Ford and Brown, both conservatives, are bosom buddies. They are not.

If anything, the former Ontario conservative leader Patrick Brown hates premier Ford for denying him the opportunity to run for Peel County chair in 2018. He had to settle for the mayoralty in Brampton instead. The only thing the two conservatives might agree on is that they are both afraid of Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie, who will soon be moving into her new role as leader of the Ontario liberals.

If anything, Brown deeply resents Ford’s easy trip into the premier’s office in Brown’s place. At least Crombie’s target is Ford’s job at Queen’s Park. She has other reasons to be appalled at Brown and his shenanigans.

It was the panel of conservative appointees who were supposed to help the three municipalities in Peel County to come to a new arrangement. Somebody must have told them of the complaints about Brown in Brampton. Instead of doing their job, the panel told the premier that the split would cause too many problems for the three municipalities, such as higher municipal taxes, and was not worth it. If they had been telling the truth, they might have also said they did not want to spend the next couple years fighting with Mr. Brown.

One of the complications in the separation of the three municipalities was the water supply for Brampton came from Mississauga. If Brampton paid for a stand-alone water system, it would take a major increase in municipal taxes. The separation of the two municipalities would lower Mississauga taxes and put the water costs where they belong. Paying higher municipal taxes in Brampton could be balanced in part if Mississauga could stop paying towards Brampton’s water supply.  

There are many other concerns but the panel of conservative appointees did not waste their time in dumping the job.

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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry            

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

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