Category: Provincial Politics

It started with education. For many years community colleges and universities in Ontario and across Canada have been selling education to the children of wealthy parents in foreign countries. This was something that was happening anyway and the argument has always been that the substantial fees paid were helping fund higher education for Canadian students. It was never the intent to put the needs of these fee-paying students ahead of the students the schools were built to serve.

But that seems it might be the argument when you look at medical tourism. And that would be very wrong. While the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York have become known for their clinical services to the sick from around the world, there has been little suggestion that these leading research centres are enabling medical tourists to use their wealth to jump the queue of American patients.

What is wrong about medical tourism in Ontario is that people are not getting clear answers to their questions. There also seems to be a rather confused argument being made. The other day, an opinion column by a Toronto Star columnist actually said that “Foreign patients can buy their way to the front of the line but wealthy Ontarians can’t.” We can only hope that was just another example of bad editing by the Toronto Star.

The only stipulations that anyone should want in regards to foreigners using our medical facilities is 1) that nobody is moved in the queue because of their ability to pay, and 2) there is an overview that ensures citizens needs always come first.

What we do not need is a Minister of Health in Ontario who refuses to acknowledge that services are being sold to foreign patients. That is making the system look bad. What makes the system look good is the humanitarian health services such as have been provided by Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children for seriously disfigured children and conjoined twins from poor countries. Yes, they are paid for most of this work because the hospital could not afford to do it otherwise.

There is no question that Ontario hospitals and medical services are among the best in the world. We would not have it any other way. At the same time it is still a work in progress. We have our challenges to meet in controlling costs and solving the many medical mysteries that remain.

There is nothing wrong with sharing our medical expertise with people from less fortunate parts of the world—as long as Ontario patients are looked after first.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Maybe Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne does not like beer. Sometimes when you get together over a bottle or so of beer, you can solve this type of problem. It simply does not work when a major participant in the problem does not drink beer. Or maybe it is her partner Jane who does the beer runs. Maybe we would be better off talking to Jane.

But we have to do something about the beer problem in this province. Sure we also want to do something about the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). The only reason that we emphasize the Beer Stores today is that LCBO stores do not stink as bad as Beer Stores. Our olfactory senses have had enough.

Do you know that one of those awful Beer Stores near us is being rebuilt? They are actually rebuilding the new store around the smell of the old store. You would think that the smell of the old store is an historic site! We have to hope that the local police do not accidently bring a cadaver sniffing dog to that Beer Store. The poor dog might go crazy and the dumb cop might have to go without his beer.

We thought we had solved the beer problem by buying our beer at the LCBO but the LCBO only carries six-packs. With company coming who drink my beer what we really wanted the other day was a 12-pack. We even tried to argue with the clerk that if the Beer Store did not have the larger pack they would give us two sixes for the price of a 12. The clerk looked directly at the ceiling surveillance monitor and gave us the company line. It boiled down to something like “Tough beans buster.”

It sure would be nice to go to either a Beer Store or an LCBO store and be treated like a valued customer instead of an incipient bother. They will, of course, be nice to you if you make a point of being nice to them and not ask stupid questions.

But as much as we think highly of the nice people in Japan who bottle Sapporo beer while owning half of Sleeman Brewery and thereby owning a share in the Ontario Beer Stores and Brewers’ Warehousing, we wonder why they do? Why do we countenance a foreign-owned cartel that runs smelly Beer Stores controlling our beer sales?

How about it Ms. Wynne? Do you or your partner really like those smelly Beer Stores?

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Former Toronto mayoralty candidate Doug Ford says he might want to go on to fame as leader of the Ontario Conservatives. This is serious folks. Doug Ford is the guy who said that what the Ontario Conservatives really need is an enema. We would all have a good laugh and go home if it were not for the fact he might be serious about his next challenge.

And the reason many Conservatives are cottoning to the idea is the showing the older Ford brother made in the recent Toronto election. Sure, Ford Nation as it is called really belongs to Rob Ford. Rob Ford loaned this army to his brother for the recent mayoralty race because of Rob’s illness and what happened gave political experts something of a surprise. Doug Ford, in a very short period, grew the size of the support

In a municipal election that saw some 60 per cent of Toronto’s eligible electors go to the polls, Doug Ford polled 34 per cent of the vote. He produced at least 30,000 votes more than the highest projections. While he was beaten by the 40 per cent vote for John Tory, it is the voting pattern that told the tale of the city. The 23 per cent who voted for former MP Olivia Chow made no difference.

Doug Ford won in the north of Etobicoke and in most of Scarborough. These are provincial riding areas where the Provincial PCs have never dreamed of winning. They are the lowest income areas of the city. The voters are the most impoverished, poorly housed and least educated losers in the city. If you can get them angry enough, they will vote to get even.

It takes a populist politician with the least to lose to motivate these voters. They will vote for the irrational, for the bigot, for the fascist, for the inflamed rhetoric. The rules in municipal elections allowed Ford to use his own money to fund and drive a less than smooth or well organized mob of supporters. It was a campaign that thrived on ignorance and bias. If some of the promises conflicted and confused, so be it. Never give your supporters time to think. It would just puzzle them.

The guy having the best laugh at the prospect of Doug Ford in the race for the leadership is former leader Timmy Hudak. A win by Doug Ford would vindicate him.

And the frightening thing is that the combination of Doug Ford’s Ford Nation and the Ontario Landowners’ rural strength could defeat the Liberals. They would only win once.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne needs to check her dictionary. She needs to understand the definition of the word ‘liberal.’ Oxford says it best. In politics it means “favourable to democratic reform and individual liberty.” Could it be any easier to understand? You can expand on that but it gives you the basics. It is why we are not particularly pleased with Ms. Wynne and her sham of a “Liberal” government.

Nothing says “reactionary” and “conservative” better than a closed mind. And Ms. Wynne and her ministers have certainly convinced us of their closed minds. The recent farce of a report from TD Bank’s Ed Clark and his panel of political has-beens stuck firmly to the government orders to neither privatize liquor and wine sales nor loosen the reins on beer sales.

What is galling about this is that someone such as Clark should recognize the long-term financial gains for the government in privatization of liquor and wine distribution and the better distribution of beer sales. The government would not only earn more in annual revenues and in taxes but more convenient distribution would help solve some of the abuses in alcoholic beverages consumption. It certainly does not take a merchandising genius to understand that the smaller packages of beer that would sell the most in convenience and food stores would earn more taxes.

The throne speech that this government used to open our provincial parliament recently was not liberal. It was a litany of conservative bromides. It emphasized infrastructure needs over peoples’ needs. It put the financial deficit ahead of the deficits in health care and social services. It offered more to business and less to the citizens who had put their confidence in this government. And it will be interesting to watch as the plans for the retirement benefit supplement are finalized whether Ontario citizens will really benefit from the investment fund created.

And please do not point to the recent budget as being progressive. It was a budget of half measures planned to annoy the New Democrats into an election. Which it did.

The Ontario Liberals do not seem to understand that they were the best of a poor choice in the last provincial election. The opposition parties helped to defeat themselves. They had leadership problems and strategic problems. They fumbled the ball.

That gives the Wynne government the next four years to prove that it can be progressive and liberal. It is the time for the big ideas that capture the imaginations of the voters. It is a time for real reform. It is a time to lead. Or they can sit back and coast for four years. And then they will be tossed out.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

When you take a poll to help sell newspapers, how serious can you be? Does the poll even matter if it restates the obvious? It is giving the entire business of polls a bad name.

Take the Toronto Star. The Star hires Forum Research to take a poll. Last week the poll was on the candidates for the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party leadership. It is a very cheap poll. Since it is so unimportant neither the Star not Forum Research really want to waste much money. They knew the answers before they took the poll.

Would you believe that 60 per cent of the Ontario residents polled have no idea? Mind you a third of those people said ‘None of the above.’ They got better answers when they narrowed the poll down to Conservative supporters.

This is what happens when you use that silly interactive telephone response system. It supposedly dials at random and asks automated questions of whoever answers. The way people talk to those calls, they should have their mouths washed out with a strong soap.

This type of survey is based on quantity of answers, not quality. They answers are suspect before you even start to count. Take another poll the next day and you will find wild swings in the results. And when you just pick the ones who said they voted Conservative, you not only get a much smaller sample but you might get ones who know something of the questions.

So are you surprised that MPP Christine Elliot, Jim Flaherty’s widow from Whitby-Oshawa, got 14 per cent support? MPP Lisa MacLeod of Nepean-Carleton was second with 9 per cent. Two male MPPs in the race and the one MP were at 6 per cent or less.

And if you want to give any credibility at all to any of those figures, they tell you that there is a long way to go before Conservatives in Ontario get to pick a new provincial leader next May. It is far too early to place any bets on this political race or to consider publishing a morning line.

But it just goes to show that the Toronto Star and its faithful pollster are keeping you abreast of the political scene in Ontario.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and her so-called Liberal Party are having a love in down in Windsor today. They had better enjoy that group hug inside because the town of Windsor is not feeling all that loving. And neither are a lot of liberals in Ontario.

It is a banker problem. It started with asking a banker like Don Drummond to solve Ontario’s financial problems. Drummond was a waste of time. Now you have a report from Ed Clark, another banker. These reports are supposedly to help Wynne’s finance guy, Charles Sousa, another erstwhile banker. And that only proves that we have to stop asking bankers difficult questions.

And did Ms. Wynne really hire former politicians Janet Ecker and Frances Lankin to assist the banker? What kind of political payoff was that? Should she not have hired some people who understood the social impacts and long-term financial consequences of what was being discussed?

If these so-called experts are going to examine rationalization of Ontario hydro distribution or rationalization of alcohol distribution in Ontario, why not give them the types of experts who understand the implications of this rationalization?

It is something of a joke for the panel to report that the Liquor stores should sell 12-packs as well as 6-packs of beer—but not two-fours! That is the kind of incremental crap that Ontario citizens have been fed for years and they are getting damn sick of it. The report’s answers on beer, wine and alcohol distribution fail to address any of the real issues.

And just how the hell is the Ontario government going to get more revenue out of those awful beer stores without the foreign owners of the Beer Store getting more and more unearned profits?

What Ms. Wynne and her sycophants in Windsor this weekend do not realize is that this is not a very important issue in the overall concerns of Ontario citizens. It just happens to be a concern for progressive voters who were very helpful in defeating Timmy Hudak and Andrea Horwath in the last election. Ms. Wynne should pay more attention to who the people are she is pissing off.

By the way, there is one thing the TD Bank executive said in his report that made sense. He said that “The LCBO should build its business around what the consumer wants, instead of what it wants.” That is exactly what privatization would achieve.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

There is a furniture store north of Toronto that has been holding going-out-of-business sales for at least the past two years. The store buys heavy flights of radio advertising on weekends that force you to find another station to listen to. It seems that the Ontario government is also having one of those sales and you actually wish it was advertised as well as the furniture store. At least the sale could be better run.

It seems that the government is going out of the business of scratch cards and on-line lotteries. You wonder why there is not a lot more interest when you hear that it is a profitable business generating $3.3 billion per year in revenue. It makes you want to go down to Queen’s Park, knock on the Premier’s office door and ask her if she knows what the hell she is doing.

First of all, there are really two businesses here. And maybe there should be three or four. And what has this government got against competition? If you are going to privatize something like lotteries, it is idiotic to not create some competition in the business while you are at it. Giving this to just one company is a guarantee of going nowhere. After all, the only reason to privatize is to increase revenues.

One company is stupid; two companies might compete; and three companies are an open market. If the government wants to earn more revenue, it has to open the market.

But to sell a government monopoly to a business monopoly is about the dumbest idea we have heard in a long, long time. People often accuse civil servants of being bureaucratic simply because they work for government. That is an ignorant assumption. Some of the most bureaucratic people we have ever met work for banks, insurance companies and Bell Canada.

While there are some positives to the bid being made by British-based Camelot Group—that seems to be a holding of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan—you would sometimes swear that the Brits invented bureaucracy. What we know for sure is that competition works and monopolies can stagnate.

The one thing for sure is that on-line lotteries are a different business than scratch cards. Some of the most serious potential for growth is in the on-line lotteries. The Internet can take this product world-wide and it needs different thinking than new types of scratch cards at Ontario convenience stores.

The guy who is going to make the greatest mess of this is Ontario Treasure Charles Sousa. Charles is a banker for goodness sake. The best bid to a guy like him will come from the bidder with the most money. He wants reliability when we need entrepeneurs!

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Now the Toronto Star is also trumpeting ranked ballots for municipal elections in Ontario. When Premier Wynne pulled the idea out of her hat the other day, the first reaction was to note that the ranked ballot, as she envisages the system, allows losers to decide the election results. And losers tend to elect mediocre politicians.

The Toronto Star believes that ranked balloting would keep us from electing people such as Doug or Rob Ford. This is based on the assumption that politicians such as the Fords would be nobodies’ second choice. That is not a safe assumption.

The problem with ranked ballots is that the ultimate choice is made from the second, third or even fourth choice of the losers. It is choosing from the bottom instead of from the top.

What the editorial writer envisages is election campaigns that are more like love-ins as all the candidates will want to win secondary support. It will tend to hide information from the voters rather than be open and honest.

The only honest and democratic method is run-off elections. When nobody has the confidence of more than 50 per cent of the voters, the voters need the opportunity to rethink their vote. You would still eliminate those candidates with the least votes. The citizens should then be entitled to an opportunity to reconsider and vote again.

This has been most often rejected in the past because of the time and cost involved for the process. It is becoming less of a problem as we head towards using the Internet to elect. The improved security of Internet voting, the low cost and the speed of releasing results can make run-off elections practical.

But until the politicians smarten up in this regard, we will still have politicians such as Premier Wynne and Toronto Star editorial writers blowing smoke, thinking they have the answers to these questions.

One can only hope that Municipal Affairs Minister Ted McMeekin knows how to do his job. Before proposing any new electoral law for Ontario municipalities, he needs to hear from election experts and citizens on how they see the future of municipal voting. He might get some surprise answers.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

In sending what she calls ‘mandate letters’ to her cabinet, Premier Kathleen Wynne has even sent one to herself as minister of intergovernmental affairs. It seems that she has finally noted the major population shifts in Ontario. She must have been told that the federal election next year will be based on new federal electoral districts in Ontario. Since Ontario pretty well tags along with the same boundaries as most federal districts, Ontario voters have been wondering when some balance will be returned in provincial voting. “Not soon,” Wynne tells herself.

For some reason, Ms. Wynne is not going to bother changing voting boundaries or the number of MPPs until after the 2018 provincial election. With representation based on Canada’s regular census held every ten years, Ontario will not have even one regular election based on the 2011 census before the ridings will again need to be adjusted. Why the Ontario government cannot make the change when the federal government has already done 90 per cent of the work, Premier Wynne does not tell herself.

With six Greater Toronto Area ridings now having populations of more than 160,000 each, they are difficult to represent properly. With the average riding having a population of 106,000, Ontario has been allocated 15 new federal ridings. Without Elections Ontario making the same changes, that means more than 1.5 million people in Ontario are not fairly represented at Queen’s Park. Does Ms. Wynne care?

Whether you agreed with former Premier Mike Harris linking provincial riding boundaries to federal boundaries in 1999 or not, he sure saved Ontario a lot of time, money and needless bickering over riding boundaries. Mind you, it was embarrassing as hell to listen to a bunch of local Conservatives telling the last federal redistribution commission how smart they were when our local Barrie riding was sliced in half and added to rural areas. Nobody seemed to be concerned that it was sure to improve the Tory vote in the new ridings. The local Liberal associations in Simcoe County had no idea how badly they had been rooked.

But it is obvious that Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals are going to do well with the new federal boundaries next year. With Ontario having 121 federal seats, the federal Liberals are in a good position to capture more than 70 of them next year.

It is sometimes surprising to realize Premier Wynne is a poor political strategist.

-30-

Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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