Category: Provincial Politics

Clarence Decatur Howe, minister of everything important in the Mackenzie King government, was never one our favourite Liberal role models but we always gave him the credit for creating Trans-Canada Airlines (now Air Canada) and for the amazing effort he put into Canada’s war materiel production in the Second World War as well as the remarkably quick switch to reconstruction after the war. The C.D. Howe Institute named for him is a right-wing think tank with much more credibility than the Fraser Institute. It means when the C.D. Howe Institute tells you how you can make money, you best listen.

And the C.D. Howe Institute gave some very good advice to Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa last week and he had better listen up. The institute told Charles the same thing we have been telling him, repeatedly, over the past year. If he chooses not to listen to Babel-on-the-Bay, that is his problem. If he chooses not to listen to the C.D. Howe Institute, then the Wynne government has a problem with him.

What the institute said very simply was that “The lack of competition in Ontario’s system for alcoholic beverages causes higher prices for consumers and foregone government revenue.” You can deny the logic of that when it comes from someone who merely understands retail merchandising but now the capitalists and economists are on board.

But you can bet the government will fight back. These paternalistic political Neanderthals in Ontario think that they are doing something socially responsible. They actually pour profits into the pockets of foreign-owned beer companies by setting the minimum prices for selling beer in Ontario. The Beer Store operates the worst, inconvenient and most regressive system of retailing in this province and the government stupidly takes pride in screwing the consumer.

What the government fails to understand is that they would create more jobs, reduce binge drinking and earn more in taxes with beer being distributed through convenience and other food stores. The vertical integration of the majority of beer sales in Ontario is not just an impediment for the consumer but a choke on government tax earnings.

And as much as the politicians will rally around the LCBO ‘model,’ it is a failure in multi-billion dollar proportions. It is a lasting tribute to the ignorance of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) of 100 years ago and the politicians who allowed the WCTU’s foolishness.

The effective transitioning of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario to private hands would produce billions in found revenue to the province as well as assure the continued growth of annual revenue from the sales. And when the C.D. Howe Institute tells you can make more money from something, you know you can take it to the bank.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Nothing seems to arouse passions more than when somebody decides to build something in what you consider as your backyard. There are those who will sometimes carry their protests beyond what is law-abiding. NIMBY’s we have known have been known to riot.

But the real problem with NIMBY’s is that they can sometimes get in the way of progress that is of benefit to the rest of their community. This can cause a counter reaction to nimbyism that can raise temperatures and trouble for a community.

Take the current argument in Bala, Ontario. Bala is a jewel of the Muskoka’s. It is where on warm summer weekends, we young guys used to clamber into the sharpest convertible one of us was driving and troll for nubile females. Some of the ladies with large purses were also invited to join us at Gerry Dunn’s Pavilion in the evening. You needed someone to sneak your bottle of Canadian Club rye past the vigilant provincial police.

And for scenic beauty in the area, it is hard to beat Bala Falls. It is where water from the Moon River empties into Lake Muskoka. There is enough of a drop at the Falls that at one time there was a small hydro-electric generating station there. The generating station became redundant when Ontario Hydro said that big was better and opted to go with nuclear energy.

Since what goes around really does go around and we realized small was better, there is now a company building another hydro generating station at Bala Falls. And that has brought out the NIMBYs. Since they can hardly object to the old generating station being replaced, the NIMBYs are complaining that the new generating station will block an historic portage around the falls. Nobody seems to know how many people are foolhardy enough to try to do a very dangerous portage there today or need to when it is easier and safer to do it by road.

Not surprisingly, it is property owners within sight of the falls who are screaming the loudest. They remind us of the people in Mississauga and Oakville who objected to the gas-fired generating plants for those communities. They were quite pleased to waste many millions of taxpayers’ money to get those plants out of their backyard. They had no idea what those plants would look like or how they would blend in with the surroundings.

And is it any wonder that people have less and less tolerance for NIMBYs today?

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

It started with an article in the Toronto Star. It was not only confusing but the choice of words tended to cloak the problems. Plus the locations are confusing. Judging by how the story is structured, it is obviously put together by a trained reporter. The reporter’s sources were also disclosed as Environment Canada and the Ministry of Energy in Alberta. It seems that the Alberta Energy people must have learned an entirely different science than those of us in the rest of Canada.

It is the source documents from the Alberta Ministry of Energy that seem to have caused the confusion. The Toronto Star story is about a tar-sands company Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) that has had a bitumen seepage problem around one of its deep bitumen extraction wells in the Cold Lake tar sands area in north eastern Alberta.

This seepage started two years ago and Alberta Energy and the company are still trying to figure out why. It is reported that CNRL has let something like 1.2 million litres of bitumen go into the local environment with resulting deaths among the local wildlife.

The confusion as to the area of the spill is because there are at least four major fissures where extensive blowout seepage is evident. These sites are as much as 15 kilometres apart, centred on Burnt Lake that is 20 to 25 kilometres west of the Primrose Lake air firing range of the Canadian Air Force.

What is believed to have happened is that the Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) technology used by CNRL has forced open old drill holes in the area and that the company did not have the equipment in place to capture the bitumen at those locations.

What has environmentalists concerned is that SAGD mining injects high pressure steam in a ‘down’ well to force bitumen to the surface through an ‘up’ well. They are worried that the pressure of the steam has fractured the underlying rock formations in the area and nobody knows where the bitumen will next emerge.

An Alberta Energy document that explains the process to the public, tells us that 80 per cent (135 billion barrels) of the tar sands bitumen are buried too deep below the surface for open pit mining and can only be accessed by methods such as SAGD.

The only serious problem with the document is that Energy Alberta refers to the emerging material as oil. It is bitumen and bitumen can only become synthetic crude oil by going through a highly polluting refining process.

The document also refers to the bitumen and condensed steam as an emulsion. While you might be able to create something similar to an emulsion under laboratory conditions, it is important to remember that condensed steam has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. It is called water. Bitumen and water do not mix.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

This is for our devoted Alberta readers. Yes, we know about you. Google tells all. It is time we discussed the cris de coeur over former Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s sense of entitlement. Is it not enough that the poor lady was turfed from her job by the jealous and the whining? Must the Wildrose hounds keep baying after her?

After all, where does someone in the job of premier in that beautiful province find a role model? Does the lady not look with envy at the Airbus A310 so readily at the beck and call of her fellow Calgary politician, Prime Minister Harper? And here is oil-rich Alberta with but four miserable little prop jobs to ferry politicians around the province. Betcha Calgary based Enbridge has more planes than the province.

It is hardly like Ontario with its fleets of fixed wing, land and float-equipped aircraft as well as rotary wing provided by the Ministry of Natural Resources. Ontario takes its role of protecting the province’s environment seriously and has the equipment to do the job. So, if a few politicians hop on board occasionally, who would notice and what auditors would care?

And the feds, hah! The Hair and his hairdresser fly where they want and when they want. And just let the military delay their departure for sunny climes? Nobody is counting the pennies on the big trip to the Holy Land earlier this year. There were a lot of Jewish votes to win and this was the Hair’s version of the Hajj! Instead of stoning the devil, he stuck his Christmas wish list in the Western Wall.

And was the Hair’s trip to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s funeral not the straw that upset Redford’s opponents? She got a free trip from Ottawa with the Hair and his hairdresser but had to fly back commercial to look after government business in Edmonton. And commercial flights from Johannesburg to Edmonton are hardly cheap. It cost her job.

Maybe Ms. Redford’s enemies should direct their venom at the Prime Minister of Canada. After all, he is the instigator of this aircraft envy business.

What Alberta needs is someone such as Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi in the Premier’s job. The province needs someone who can make peace not war with the rest of the country. It needs someone who can tone down the rhetoric over pipelines and bitumen. It needs someone who can put Alberta’s future ahead of unrealistic bitumen profits.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

In July 2010 the Ontario government gave Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG) new direction. It pointed to a new future. It was a future where OLG would be more market-driven and responsive to consumers. It was to involve the private sector and advanced technologies in its growth. And a new OLG would evolve that would have a clearer mandate, efficiencies and be more effective.

And in being more effective, the government made it clear that OLG would create thousands of new jobs in the gaming industry, another 4000 or so new jobs in the service industry, find about $3 billion in private sector investment and add more than a billion in new annual revenue for the province. This was not a sit-on-your-ass mandate.

But sit-on-your-ass was what the province got. When OLG chair Paul Godfrey pissed off the burghers of Toronto and Gramma Wynne fired him that was the end of the OLG dream. The province has civil servants running the OLG into the ground now and the dream of riches and ease for the Ontario Treasurer are dead and dying. And Ontario is missing the jobs, the investment and that all important revenue.

But, what the hell, Finance Minister Sousa can always raise taxes. Right? All he has to say is that if you do not want casinos in your back yard, you will, of course, be pleased to pay more taxes? That is about to happen on a chilly weekend in July!

The facts are that the City of Toronto has a totally dysfunctional city council playing with a disgraceful amount of money on behalf of a very confused citizenry. And it is the province’s fault. Instead of helping the city with its management problems, Queen’s Park compounds them in doling out promised infrastructure grants for transportation systems that the city so desperately needs but fights about instead.

And who is going to be so stupid as to complain if the province says: Casinos are legal and there will be one at Woodbine Race Track. Most people do not even know that the site is in Toronto. The province could even put in another casino in Markham or Durham as part of some other deal and nobody would mind. With four years to the next election, nobody would remember that Charles Sousa was dictatorial; just smart.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

One of the most frightening think pieces during the recent provincial election was the piece by Bob Hepburn of the Toronto Star entitled Last gasp for Harris-era dream platform? It ran on the day when voters were going to the polls on June 12. It was a fitting time for it. It explained why Conservative Timmy Hudak’s days at the helm of his party were already numbered.

The article was ostensibly about the team preparing the way for a Tim Hudak-run Conservative government for Ontario. The team was chaired by Tom Long, the boy wonder of Canadian Conservatism in the Harris era. His team included Leslie Noble and Paul Rhodes who were back for another go at the hard right Hudak version of the Common Sense Revolution. Hudak’s wife Bev Hutton, also a retread from the Harris government of 1995 through to 2003, was at least an honourary part of the team.

The team was paid by the Ontario PC Party to plan the transition from a Liberal government to the hoped for Conservative government that the Conservatives anticipated. We should all be thankful that it never happened. After the Conservatives tried to spin that Hudak was the winner of the televised debate, many Conservatives were convinced that they were winning.

Hepburn told readers that the team had not been involved in Hudak’s embarrassing loss in 2011. Hudak was expected to win that election and the loss to the McGuinty Liberals was humiliating. Yet it was only McGuinty who realized that there was no next time for him and he set the wheels in motion for the tightly controlled convention that chose Kathleen Wynne as the new leader.

Hepburn also tells us that it was Long and his team who convinced Hudak to focus on the million jobs plan in the 2014 election campaign. They are also purported to be the geniuses who led Hudak to also promise to rid the government of a hundred thousand civil service jobs. It was that straw that broke the camel’s back. It caused a shift of about four per cent of the popular vote away from the Conservatives and a humiliating loss for Tim Hudak, Tom Long, Paul Rhodes and Leslie Noble. It might be a long wait for those four horsemen to be invited to their next Ontario Conservative Party meeting.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to peter@lowry.me

Hey it won an election for the Liberals did it not? It shows how rarely we hear a good budget read in this country. It also shows how ignorant those people are who go on and on about the deficit. Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s Ontario budget of May 1 and again of July 14 is a winner. He needs to remember that.

Being a banker by trade Sousa does worry about balancing the books. What he needs to understand is that it is not the average citizen who got us into the current financial doldrums. It was bankers. Sure, they were American bankers that started the entire mess but they were still bankers. If it had not been for our Canadian bankers’ innate sense of caution and conservatism we would have been right into sub-prime mortgages like the American banks.

But here we are more than five years after the American financial bubble burst still struggling to move the economy forward and to create more worthwhile jobs for people in Ontario. While it was the tried and true infrastructure investment that carried us this far, we need better thinking for the future.

Charles has got to think outside the banker’s box. He has to realize that Ontario does not have to compete with other states, provinces, countries to be the cheapest. All we have to do is continue to be the best—the best educated work force, the best environment, with the best medical care and the best policed and peaceful communities and the best place for work, recreation and to raise a family. We have got a lot going for us in Ontario and Charles has to realize that people are more than willing to pay their share in maintaining it.

And he should not forget there are financial opportunities for the taking. Just because Toronto Council is dysfunctional is no excuse for Toronto not to have the casinos it needs to offer a complete range of attractions for tourists. Charles needs to remember that gambling is legal in Ontario—when it is run by the province—and there is no excuse for some places to not have the full range of services.

Charles also needs to understand simple opportunities such as selling beer in convenience stores. Who gives a damn what the blue stocking crowd think? There is far more tax revenue for the province from convenience stores than from those smelly beer stores.

There is a world of opportunities for the province to balance the books. It will happen if we just grow up and take the opportunities available to us.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

It is likely Whitby-Oshawa MPP Christine Elliott is serious this time out. She wants another try at being leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. She has disappointed Prime Minister Stephen Harper in her quick decision. Harper had hoped she would replace her late husband Jim Flaherty in Ottawa. She is far wiser to travel the provincial path.

After being beaten by the right wing Tim Hudak at the 2009 leadership convention, Elliott is quick off the mark this time. She is betting that the Ontario PCs will want to offer voters a more humanist view of conservative politics after Hudak’s humbling.

It is likely to be a lengthy campaign as the party might take as long as a year before holding a leadership convention. The caucus has already selected MPP Jim Wilson from Simcoe-Grey, one of its more reliable long-time members, as an interim leader. With the majority held today by the Liberals, nobody is worried about an early election.

A lawyer, Elliott comes by her political credentials in her own right as well as her late husband’s. She took over the former Whitby-Ajax provincial riding in a 2006 by-election when Jim Flaherty switched to the federal seat to become Stephen Harper’s finance minister. They became the federal-provincial tag team when Whitby-Oshawa riding became both federal and provincial in 2007.

The question is very much whether today’s Ontario PC Party will accept Elliott as leader? As both Jim Flaherty and her proved, she is from a kinder, gentler era. Her problem will be to prove that she has hard-nosed fiscal credentials. And that will be the gist of her campaign. If the party can find its way back to the politics of the Bill Davis era, can it win in the 21^st Century?

It looks as though the early challengers are hard liners compared to Elliott. There can be lots of conjectures but it is too early for forecasts. The PCs might end up with an interesting leader but how she would ever handle the likes of MPP Randy Hellier is the question.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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