Category: Provincial Politics

In a news conference the other day, Quebec Premier Pauline Marois was accompanied by her star candidate Pierre Karl Péladeau. She was quoted as saying to the news media that nobody is perfect. Those are likely to be the definitive words of the current Quebec election campaign—along with the visual of her pushing Péladeau away from the microphone earlier in the campaign.

Halfway through her attempt to win a majority government, Premier Marois is already eating crow. She made the point by bringing the crow with her in the form of her Saint-Jérȏme candidate. What she was apologizing for was the use of a picture of Justice France Charbonneau in promoting her party but after her poor showing in the leaders’debate the night before Marois also needed to apologize for that.

But her biggest problem is Pierre Karl Péladeau’s bringing a sovereignty referendum to the fore instead of appearing to be the financial stability that Quebec needs. What caused the problem was Péladeau being himself. Trying to position him as a successful businessman is ignoring the fact that he inherited his late father’s business empire. His stewardship of that wealth has been tumultuous, marked by the failure of Quebecor World, heavy losses in his nascent English-language TV network and worsening labour relations. And Pauline Marois thinks this guy’s business acumen can help her party?

Péladeau was like a little boy with a new toy when Marois announced his candidacy and his fist-pumping declaration for sovereignty was the beginning of the end for Marois’ electoral hopes. “A referendum if necessary but not necessarily a referendum” is not going to fly with the voters in English or French.

It is something of a surprise that Marois does not understand the difference between popularity and notoriety. Péladeau has certainly been notorious in Quebec for some time. Whether you approve or disapprove of his choice of bed mates, there are still a few cantankerous older Quebecers who believe the sanctity of marriage is important for the children. There are even more Quebecers who understand that successful negotiations between labour and management require an open and honest approach. And that does not appear to be the Péladeau approach. Pierre Karl Péladeau might have lots of notoriety in Quebec but he does not seem to have the popularity that Pauline Marois is looking for.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

We are not entirely sure whether Ontario Premier Wynne is just breathing hard or seeking to achieve new heights. She told reporters the other day that the Liberals are going to have an aspirational budget. And just because Microsoft’s Canadian spell checker does not recognize the word, the Oxford dictionary does. It simply means it is something earnestly desired.

The next Ontario budget is now expected at the beginning of May and that will likely trigger a June provincial election. Whether the budget plan will be something that Ontario voters want to earnestly desire is going to be the main question. Opposition Leader Timmy Hudak is nothing if not consistent and he promises to condemn it before he even hears what is in it. As far as Tiny Tim is concerned the budget could be ghost written by the late guru of the right Milton Freidman and Timmy would still reject it.

Meanwhile Andrea Horwath of the New Democrats stays noncommittal but knows she will do herself no good by continuing to support the Liberals. This will be her one chance at the Premier’s chair in the Legislature and she does not intend to mess it up.

That leaves the heavy slugging to Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa. He is expected to fix the Liberal government’s budgeting problems. This could include expediencies such as to reprofiling taxes into new revenue streams. One of those new streams will be money for items such as Toronto subways. Since this is money that would have normally been earmarked for requirements in mundane areas such as education or healthcare, Charles is going to have to very creative as to how he makes the budget work.

One obvious suggestion is to expand the surtax currently imposed on citizens making over $500,000 per year. It is now expected to include people who make over $150,000 per year. (That last figure might be adjusted as the politicians figure out where it is that incomes move from middle class to wealthy.)

Since Canadian politicians have got into the shell game of not taxing voters and not paying for anything that the voters might not notice, they have discovered that borrowing is also an option. They figure that if the voters can max out their credit cards, why not have the government join them?

Maybe, if we are lucky, our great-great grandchildren will get the bills and wonder about the stupidity of their ancestors.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Martin Regg Cohn of the Toronto Star knows how it feels. He has been on the front lines for the Toronto Star long enough that he is showing the tedium of fighting the Beer Store. It is like punching your pillow. It just surrounds your fist and nothing happens. And if you chew at it, you will just end up with a mouthful of feathers.

But Martin marches on. A reliable journeyman journalist, he heads in the direction prescribed by his editor. The Toronto Star editorial direction is to crucify the Beer Store and it shall be done. Martin is the instrument to do the job.

Obviously the Beer Store and its owners at Brewers’ Warehousing are a bit concerned about Canada’s largest circulation newspaper calling for the company’s scalp (figuratively). They still have a lock on the most popular beers in the province and nobody will call for a tag day to protect their profits.

But the Beer Stores’ ace in the hole is Ontario’s ignorant and out-of-date politicians. They have those idiots by the short hairs. For close to 100 years, these dumb politicians have been running scared of the long-dead Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The beer monopoly goes back to the arrangement with those abolitionists to control the sale of beer through that anachronistic system. It is a system that is not only out of date today but was annoying Ontario voters back in the 1920s. It was only accepted then as being better than prohibition.

To be fair to Martin Regg Conn though, we should admit that the Beer Store is resisting his complaints. They have designated speakers now who are often managers of local Beer Stores who will tell you of the evils of letting convenience stores sell beer. They will cheerfully tell you of the evils of convenience stores selling beer and cigarettes to 16-year olds. The only thing they fail to explain is why a minimum wage Beer Store employee is harder to dupe than a minimum wage convenience store employee.

Martin takes pains to note that while Ontario Beer Stores are often smelly, uncouth, disreputable, disgusting establishments, that is not the problem. He is most perturbed to find that the Beer Stores are owned by companies in Belgium, Brazil, Japan and the United States. While that might just be catering to the Toronto Star’s xenophobia, it is not working as a call to arms.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Pierre Karl Péladeau running in Saint-Jérȏme for the Parti Québécois, brings back fond memories of John Bassett. This is the John Bassett that was famously publisher of the Toronto Telegram and the founder of CTV. And he relished having the reputation of being something of a womanizer, a sports enthusiast and an incorrigible bastard. When he died in 1998, Canada lost a legend.

Pierre Karl Péladeau is not in the same league. While Pierre Karl was whooping it up in Paris during the 1990s, purportedly running Quebecor World, which was claimed to be the world’s biggest printing company, it was his father who was building the empire in Quebec. Whether Pierre Karl is the astute businessman that some claim him to be is very much open to question. Especially since Quebecor World has gone the way of most mismanaged companies.

It is not that John Bassett did not have his ups and downs. He was not so happy when Stafford Smythe and Harold Ballard forced him out of Maple Leaf Gardens and separated him from his favourite hockey team. At the same time, the demise of his Toronto Telegram might have been the answer to building CTV.

Similar to Péladeau père creating Le Journal de Montréal, John Bassett’s father was the publisher of the Montreal Gazette and young John trained as a reporter with the Toronto Globe and Mail before the Second World War. He came back from the war and ran in Sherbrooke for the Conservative Party. He lost. That was when he bought the Sherbrooke Daily Record from his father and launched himself as a publisher.

That was not John Bassett’s last foray into the minefields of politics. In 1962, John was involved in a Keystone Kops attempt at winning Spadina Riding in Toronto for the Conservatives. He had more Telegram reporters and other functionaries who liked their jobs running around thinking they knew something about politics. It was a funny scene. He lost.

Whether there is a moral in this for Péladeau is hard to say. Luckily Saint-Jérȏme riding does not have a large union-based vote so his well-deserved reputation for being nasty with unions might not hurt him directly. His candidacy might just annoy enough union leaders though to pull some of their support from the Parti Québécois.

But, frankly, Péladeau would go further in politics running for his friend Stephen Harper and the federal Conservatives. He is hardly a credible péquiste. He might be a sovereignist with deep pockets but the thought of him wanting to be in a cabinet run by Pauline Marois is a thought that simply does not compute. It spells trouble.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Pierre Karl Péladeau scion of the Quebecor millions has agreed to run in Saint-Jérȏme riding for the Parti Québécois in the April election. Quebec Premier Pauline Marois has made the announcement just months after appointing Péladeau head of Hydro-Quebec. The choice of Saint-Jérȏme riding will allow the candidate to get in his spring skiing on the local hills along with some campaigning.

The only problem the voters might have is this is the guy who owns Sun Media across Canada and Le Journal de Montréal. He is further to the right of politics than the péquiste are to the left. He represents nothing the party stands for except separatism.

Of course, we anglophones are not supposed to understand Quebec politics. We are told that our analyses of Quebec politics are completely wrong.

Well, here is what we do know. We know that anyone who believes public opinion polls in Quebec should be a good candidate to buy some swamp land north of Baie-Comeau.

We also know that Premier Pauline Marois is starting her campaign by bashing Liberal Leader Philippe Couilard for not being as big a Quebec booster as her. She complains that he does not go along with her bigoted values charter and has never worked to protect Quebecers separatist ambitions. She should look at some of her own party’s candidates before complaining about her opposition.

Pierre Karl Péladeau is a good example. His English-language Sun News media outlets are all big supporters of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Mind you, his Sun newspapers lack proper editing and seem to be written for and read by people with a grade eight education or less. And Péladeau’s highly biased Sun TV network has yet to meet any broad acceptance by Canadians.

But for voters in Saint-Jérȏme, Péladeau’s media are doing nothing to further the tourism required to support that area of the province. As someone who has put together many Laurentian based conferences and conventions, this writer considers Péladeau as poor a booster for Quebec as he is for the rest of Canada.

When writing about this election the other day, we were told that we had no understanding of how Quebecers would react to Justin Trudeau getting involved in the Quebec provincial election. We did not say he would. We merely indicated that we thought it was a good idea. We just feel that the more people making the case for a united Canada, the fewer problems we would have later with self-serving separatists.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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

Things are quiet at Ontario Lottery and Gaming (OLG). Too bad! The people there are fun to write about. For a government agency that contributes almost $2 billion to government revenues each year, it works at keeping a low profile. It lets its games and casinos speak for it. Not that the games or casinos are good communicators.

In fact, we are watching a race down hill here. From a strategy OLG used 25 years ago of catering to the American tourist and restraining Ontario residents, the experts have had to do some serious rethinking. And if these so-called experts knew what they were doing, the rethinking might have been more fruitful.

The problem is that an aggressive attempt at modernizing (and improving profit) of OLG was undertaken by the McGuinty government with Publisher Paul Godfrey at the helm. This came to a grinding halt when the plan for a new keystone casino complex in the big-market Toronto area ran afoul of the discordance at Toronto City Hall. The one real claim to fame of soon to be former Mayor Rob Ford was to screw Woodbine Entertainment out of becoming a super casino and putting the skids under Paul Godfrey as head of OLG.

Novice Premier Kathleen Wynne fired Godfrey and little has happened since.

But, there are rumblings. Whether it is just some stomach gas or real movement for OLG remains to be seen. There are a number of keys to this. First of all, the province has to have a new balance of relocated and modernized casinos. There has to be a new investment in Internet gaming and it has to establish new standards of openness and honesty.  Once Internet gaming is established, scratch card games have to move to the Internet as well. A few printed scratch games can be offered to the non-Internet literate. Finally, lotteries have to be brought back to the reality that unless buyers see some return, fewer will keep trying for the unattainable millions.

The reality is that casinos have to have tourists. Tourists bring the money. They are there to experience. Where the tourists are so are the dollars.

If the Province of Ontario says its Internet games are honest, players will tune in from around the world.

And lottery buyers hardly want many millions. They just want to win something.

There is no problem with OLG. It is the politicians who are stupid.

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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry

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