Category: Provincial Politics

Del Duca Dumbing Down.

by Peter Lowry

When will politicians learn not to leap into voting reform without at least checking? At a sort-of liberal party meeting today, Ontario liberal party leader Steven Del Duca intends to promise Ontario voting reform—a subject he does not seem to understand.

Like prime minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario’s liberal leader (without a seat in the legislature) is promoting that, if he is elected premier, to use ranked ballots for future Ontario elections. Neither leader has thought much about the subject. This form of voting has been used in municipal elections in cities such as London Ontario and also by the federal conservative party.

What people need to know is that ranked balloting is not the same as an instant run-off election. Nor is it a fairer form of voting. There are lots of variables in ranked balloting. Much depends on the number of candidates, the closeness of the race and the mind-set of the voters.

The best result is when there are few candidates and one of the candidates gets more than 50 per cent of the first votes cast. It is exactly the same as first-past-the-post, you have a winner on the first ballot.

The worst result is when there are many candidates and none of them is a shining star. The worst of the ranking happens when voters think they have to fill in some second, third and fourth, etc., choices. They might not have thought this process through before the balloting. They sometimes spend an inordinate amount of time doodling on their ballot.

Frankly, you should never trust voters to have a fifth, sixth or seventh choice in mind. This is the situation where the series of vote counts are actually dumbing down to the least offensive of the candidates.

All the liberals need to do is look at the end result of the balloting in the last two leadership contests for the federal conservative party. Those were the contests that chose first Andrew Scheer and then Erin O’Toole as leaders of that party.

Would you want results such as those from voting in Ontario?

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Does Doug Do Privacy?

by Peter Lowry

Bet you are all set to go with your smart phone and Ontario premier Doug Ford’s vaccine passport. You do realize, I hope, that this passport with its QR code can contain much more than just your COVID-19 vaccine status?  With capacity for 4000 characters, it is not as simple as a tweet on Twitter. The ministry of health includes recent lab tests and other information in its QR code. It is hard to get in touch with anybody in the know about this question at Queen’s Park. No doubt, you would agree to sharing some of the details with your doctor. You might want to draw the line though with the guy on the door at your local gym.

Would you really want to share your recent test results for gonorrhea? Or your prescription to help you get erections? Maybe you scoff at this, but a rushed QR code app might just be making a mockery of your supposed right to privacy.

Maybe they are lazy? Because they were in a hurry? Because they did not want to excise your recent lab results, doctor to doctor information or your refills at your pharmacy?

Nobody is arguing that the ministry of health vaccine certificates we used for the past month are easy to fake but this QR code might be a major trade-off.

And maybe all that extraneous info has been deleted. Mind you, I worry more about the people without smart phones. And it is not just seniors. Some people simply do not want or cannot afford a smart phone. I have never seen a deal for a smart phone that did not start at less than $50 per month. And that is before all the charges for extra usage.

I, for one, am quite happy with my $10 per month cell phone (a cheap flip phone). It serves nicely as an emergency phone in the car and to check with the wife when buying her something at the grocery store. The home phones are the same $10 per month deal.

And I really wish that restaurants would go back to the colorful printed menus, that made them think twice about the printing costs, before raising prices.

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

The Face of COVID.

by Peter Lowry

Don’t you hate those obituaries that read: ‘Died peacefully with family in attendance.’ And you know it is B.S. written by an unimaginative and unctuous undertaker. The person probably passed away kicking and screaming and fighting, while the family was in the waiting room arguing over the estate.

COVID-19 needs a new face. The next time someone dies of COVID in your local hospital, their agony needs to lead the six o’clock TV news, be spread across the front pages of the newspapers and replace the placebos of FaceBook. This is a wrongful death. It is no less than a murder. It is death by COVID, spread by the uncaring of the unvaccinated.

And that does not let the idiot politicians off the hook. If we had smart politicians, vaccination would have been mandatory from day-one of vaccines becoming available. It never was intended as an option.

Nobody has the right to spread death. The unvaccinated have become modern-day lepers. We need to put them in cages, send them to die among colonies of the unvaccinated, not beg them or pay them to join the human race.

We don’t want the unvaccinated in our homes, in our stores, in our workplaces, in our parks or places of amusement. If they don’t want to join us, then make them go away.

Did we really want to spend the past year and more looking at statistics, watching politicians reading scripts on the advice of administration doctors, who might not have diagnosed a patient in the past 20 years? This was not reality. This was a farce written by incompetents and screened by political speech writers. They never bothered to show the horror,

We would have been smarter to get some of our western friends off the range and let them rope and hogtie the unvaccinated—so we can brand them with vaccine where it hurts.

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Doing a Dance with Doug.

by Peter Lowry

Ontario premier Doug Ford isn’t much of a politician but whomever is advising him on the day care file isn’t either. The feds are offering Ontario $10 billion to get on board the federal day care deal and the Ontario conservatives are hemming and hawing! They have to be clueless to not understand what this deal will add to the economy of Ontario. This is a dance Ontario doesn’t need.

Would you believe that the conservatives are suggesting that Ontario deserves more than $10 billion? Ontario and Quebec are the only two provinces that could do this on their own. They don’t really need the federal largess.

Maybe Doug Ford is waiting for Premier Kenney in Alberta to make the decision first. He would hardly be waiting for the other holdout, New Brunswick. Isn’t it amazing that three conservative premiers waited until after the election to even talk about the proposal?

But you hardly want to annoy a large number of women voters by dragging your feet on this issue.

Typical of conservatives, the Ontario dim-wits are questioning if the province can afford to subsidize day care to get it down to $10 per day. The truth be told, Ontario cannot afford not to. Every new day care space created, adds to the Ontario economy, helps create jobs and frees another person to get a job.

And that is the challenge. The $10 billion offered Ontario is to kick-start the creation of day care spaces, the training of child care workers and a chance to be creative. Private companies can create many of those spaces as the major users are their own employees. The same goes for government offices, schools, hospitals and churches. There is space to be converted to safe, comfortable, controlled and inexpensive day care. New building is another opportunity with condos, rentals, offices, shopping centres and services to include properly planned day care space.

And, one other point. Is that $10 per day in 2019 dollars or in 2026 dollars? There has to be some flexibility for cost of living here. We hardly want another fiasco such as Doug Ford’s famous ‘Buck a Beer.’

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Defining Del Duca.

by Peter Lowry

Ontario premier Doug Ford would have taken the advice from his late brother Rob. The former Toronto mayor would have used the municipal measure of when a campaign begins. Hit your opponents in January and defeat them in October is the municipal election theory. Ford has gone on the attack this month in preparation for the provincial vote in June next year.

Describing the opposition leader, the new democrat’s Andrea Horwath, is the easy part: she’s boring, she’s ineffective, she’s going nowhere. What more need the conservatives say?

Defining liberal leader Stephen Del Duca is more of a challenge. Ontario wide, Del Duca is an unknown. And it was looking as though it could cost the liberals a lot to make him known. Just maybe, Doug Ford, with his inexperience, will do some of the job for them. He is going to introduce Del Duca as part of the cabinet of former liberal premier Kathleen Wynne. That might be more of a help than a hinderance.

After all, why would you want to attack a guy for being experienced? And they seem blind to the fact some of the Wynne government actions were in strong contrast to the Ford government actions when coming into power.

Take the minimum wage fiasco for one. The Wynne government had promised a raise in minimum wage to $15 per hour for 2019. Ford knocked that back to $14 per hour. It was this year when they took it up to $14.35 per hour. With the serious profiteering in the grocery stores this year, it is easy to see why many refer to the conservative action as purposely preserving poverty.

One of Doug’s most serious early mistakes was his spiteful attack on the democracy of the elections in Toronto, after the municipal campaigns were underway. It showed him as a petty person.

To maybe(?) help dispel that thought, his campaign is launching the idea of the Ford government as “the government that says ‘Yes.’” The opponents should be able to drive a truck through that idea.

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Dougie Dimes Us.

by Peter Lowry

Ontario premier Doug Ford must think he is John D. Rockefeller. That was the Rockefeller who built Standard Oil of New Jersey into the industrial bemouth of today. It was always assumed that Ivy Lee, a pioneer of public relations in the United States, had advised his client, Rockefeller, to always carry a supply of dimes to give to people he met—to counter the common view that the Rockefeller wealth came from being a skinflint.

But what is a dime worth today when Ford’s conservatives just raised the minimum wage by 10-cents an hour. After scrapping the liberal promise to jump the minimum wage in Ontario to a basic $15 per hour three years ago, Ford found it in his stone-cold heart to raise the minimum wage to $14.35. It is, of course, less for teenagers and restaurant servers.

The best description we have heard so far to this increase is that the Ford government is working to maintain poverty. More than 600,000 people in Ontario work for minimum wage.

Ford considers himself a populist and is famous for his foolish promise to his followers of “a buck-a-beer.” That never panned out either.

One of the frequent lies in social media today is that the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), that was initiated during the worst of the pandemic, has been responsible for people not rushing back to work for minimum wages.

In the Ontario market, where single family dwellings are routinely selling for over a million dollars, the minimum wage is an insult to anyone to whom it is offered. Nobody should need to work for so little.

And there is little sympathy for restaurants where servers have to rely on tips to put together a living wage. Nobody should have to rely on the generosity of customers to fill their earnings needs.

The worst example of people working for a minimum wage are the seniors who cannot pay their rent if they do not earn some extra money. For them, the Ontario minimum wage is particularly demeaning.

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

(more…)

Ontario’s Ford Diet.

by Peter Lowry

How is that for service from our Ontario premier? Being a bit overweight has followed me for many years but I found the solution last year. I went on the Doug Ford diet. In five weeks in an Ontario hospital last year, mostly because of a shattered ankle, I lost 9 kilograms. It was the food. In a hospital known for having a good kitchen, the food was being catered and was awful. I have no idea why the hospital’s kitchen was closed but they were sure saving money. The best meal I had while there was when the wife brought me a quarter-pounder from McDonald’s.

But when you find that the Ontario conservatives spent $3.5 billion less on healthcare than forecast last year, you knew what they were doing. In the midst of a pandemic, they were underfunding our hospitals in an attempt to squeeze out what they think of as unnecessary expense. Staff would tell me about supplies not arriving that were needed for patients. Entire wards were closed because of the lack of staff. Surgeries were cancelled and put off. It did no good to complain. Complaints fell on deaf ears among the bureaucrats.

And what adds outrage to this ill-considered and dangerous practice was that the federal government gave Ontario an extra $7.7 billion in one-time transfer payments because of the pandemic.

Have you ever noted that conservatives are quick to tell you they will throw money at a problem—if you are shrill and get news media support? And have you ever followed up and found out what they really spent? They lie, you know.

Did you see the temporary wards set up in the parking lots at some of our major hospitals? They must have been for show. I never heard of one being used. We hardly had the staff needed for what was available in our hospitals. The nurses I talked to were working 12-hour shifts and were exhausted then.

One thing for sure, nobody was overstaying their welcome at our hospitals. Traffic in the emergency wards was dried up. Nobody wanted to mingle with covid-19 patients. Patients spent days in the emergency hallways because of the lack of beds that were staffed.

The main objective in the surgical wards was to send the patients home sooner. And believe me, we were all eager to go. Doug Ford might be fatter than ever but those of us on the Doug Ford diet wanted to go home.

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Kenney Kills.

by Peter Lowry

Our beautiful Alberta hardly deserves what is happening today. The province’s medical system is being crushed under the severity and numbers of the fourth wave of Covid-19. Yet it is unfair to blame just one man or one political party. There is a sharing of blame to the situation.

It is not fair, for example, to blame just the extremists, the libertarians, or the former Wildrose party. They also had their supporters, those who gained from the extremist attitudes while others suffered.

How many saw what Jason Kenney saw back home in Calgary and across the province. Low or non-existent provincial taxes were the rule, the incentive. The bounty of the land and the richness of the minerals drew others, the needed investments, the jobs. And then there were the politicians of the right.

Jason Kenney was a wily one. When he saw the political opportunity in Calgary, Kenney took it. A former assistant to Saskatchewan liberal leader Ralph Goodale, he ran and won a seat in Ottawa for Calgary as Reform, and then Alliance, and finally the conservatives. He was an extremist as a Roman Catholic and as a member of parliament. He was former prime minister Stephen Harper’s ’go-to guy’ for contacts in Canada’s ethnic communities.    

Throughout the Stephen Harper years, Kenney held a number of major cabinet portfolios. It was often suggested that he was Harper’s choice as successor. That came to naught when the conservatives lost the 2015 federal election.

Despite winning his federal Calgary seat again, Kenney saw no future for him in Ottawa. He headed west intent to ‘unite the right’ in Alberta. And that is where our success story really ends.

There were many complaints about Kenney’s tactics in uniting the right and absorbing the Wildrose party into the united conservatives. He was repeatedly accused of misogyny and improper tactics in the race to the premier’s chair. His greatest failure was to open up the province to a pandemic free summer when the fourth wave was clearly lurking and waiting. Though he can easily share the blame.

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Hey, White Man?

by Peter Lowry

The Toronto Star has gone over the edge. They found a professor in Ottawa who thinks it is alright to call Canadians of European origin “white men” and infer that they are the problem. I have been called some different names in my lifetime but nobody has ever called me out for being white.

But I take exception to this foolish academic writing with such a broad brush about the supposed attitudes of “white people” in Canada. To dismiss our concerns about the discriminatory measures of Quebec’s provincial politicians because of some supposed problems across Canada is specious and wrong.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to read the ravings of these academics who consider themselves expert on the pathology of discrimination.

Nobody is claiming that Quebecers are more or less discriminatory than Canadians in other provinces. It might be more open in Quebec because of the politicians who give it license. It is also made worse by federal politicians who think they can gain votes in Quebec by alibiing Quebec politicians.  

But for Quebec politicians to hide behind this discriminatory façade to further their separatist ambitions leaves the rest of us a little cold toward them. To be very blunt about it, we should all be careful not to repeat the worst aspects of human history.

And what is wrong with the Toronto Star? Have all its able editors left the building? Is there nobody left to say an op-ed is wrong? If we had more, not less, freedom of speech from the Star, maybe there would be a better selection of views to be considered. They should look at some of the blogs on the Internet. They are not all to be scorned. There are many written by writers of interest. Blogs can draw many followers.

The conclusion of the op-ed was when the writer said we should centre on BIPOC thinkers and vote for them. I looked it up and found that BIPOC stands for black, aboriginal and people of colour. I considered that briefly, and then wondered, who was being discriminatory?

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]

Dougie, Where Are You?

by Peter Lowry

It’s amazing that the two most obnoxious conservative premiers in Canada could hide out so long. The news media probably know where they were but did not care. Jason Kenney has finally reappeared and is probably the most hated politician in Alberta. It’s the brief appearance and another disappearing act by Ontario’s Doug Ford that has people wondering. My guess is that he is hiding up at his cottage.

What is annoying is that after a brief appearance, he left things more muddied than before. It was to finally approve vaccination certificates. He doesn’t think they are a good idea. So why did the cabinet need his vote?

Anyway, we are going to get some sort of passport. It can start with the vaccine receipt we received from the local health board. It then morphs into a QR code. ‘QR’ is short for ‘quick response.’ The code was invented in Japan. It seems appropriate for a people who have turned Chinese Kangi writing into an art form over the past 1600 years.

The QR version of Ontario’s passport is for people with a telephone smarter than themselves. I am not sure whether people realize just how much additional information can be included in a QR code but I, for one, will be quite happy with the information on the local health board’s receipt. I have already reduced it to wallet size and had it laminated. What I am not doing is wasting money on a smart phone.

All my life I have been known as a first adopter. I had a phone in my car in Toronto back when the equipment for it filled the trunk and there were only eight frequencies for the entire city.

Yet, I must admit that I have never understood why they put cameras in cellphones. I have never taken a picture with a cell phone and have never bothered to figure out how. And don’t ask me for my cellphone number, when I am not making a call, I turn it off.

And before I use a QR code to verify that I have had two doses of vaccine, I want to see what other information is included in that code. Maybe I will ask Doug Ford why the QR code, after he comes out of hiding.

-30-

Copyright 2021 © Peter Lowry

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

[email protected]